These are the proceedings of the 12th international workshop on cooperative informationagents(CIA2008), heldattheCzechTechnicalUniversityinPrague, Czech Republic, on September 10-12, 2008. In today's world of ubiquitously connected heterogeneous information s- tems, business services and computing devices, the intelligent coordination and provisionofrelevantadded-value informationor servicesto the user atany time, anywhere is of key importance to a variety of applications. This challenge is - visioned to be coped with by means of appropriate intelligent and cooperative information agents. An intelligent information agent is a computational software entity that is capable of accessing one or multiple, potentially heterogeneous and distributed information sources, proactively acquiring, mediating, and maintaining relevant information or services on behalf of its human users, or other agents, preferably just in time and anywhere. One key challenge of developing intelligent and - operative information systems is to balance the autonomy of networked data, information, and knowledge sourceswith the potential payo?of leveragingthem by the appropriate use of such agents. Researchonintelligentinformationagentsandsystemsisinherentlycrossd- ciplinary covering themes from domains such as AI, Multiagent Systems, HCI, SemanticWebTechnologies, WebServices, InformationSystems, KnowledgeD- covery, Information Retrieval, and P2P Computing.

In all modern military doctrines the mission effectiveness shall be dramatically increased by the robust networking of all forces, sharing of information and distributed intelligent information processing, generating situational awareness and providing decision support. In addition, these principles also offer an effective way to improve security systems that support the fight against terrorists and organized crime. Intelligent Agents are a key technology to realize such modern defence and security systems and are therefore increasingly investigated by researchers and practioners in that field.

This book is a collection of recent published and refereed papers drawn from workshops and other colloquia held in various venues around the world in the last two years. Papers in this book describe work in the development of command and control systems, military communications systems, information systems, surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, simulators and HCI. The broad nature of the application domain is matched by the diversity of techniques used in the papers that are included in the collection.

The collection provides, for the first time, an overview of the most significant work being performed by the leading workers in this area. It provides a single reference point for the state of the art in the field at the moment and will be of interest to Computer Science professionals working in the defence sector, and academics and students investigating the technology of Intelligent Agents that are curious to see how the technology is applied in practice. The book also provides valuable decision support for planners and strategists in defence- and security-related companies, organizations, ministries and departments.

The aim of the CEEMAS conference series is to provide a biennial forum for the presentation of multi-agent research and development results. With its p- ticular geographicalorientation towards Central and Eastern Europe, CEEMAS has become an internationally recognised event with participants from all over the world. After the successful CEEMAS conferences in St. Petersburg (1999), Cracow (2001) and Prague (2003), the 2005 CEEMAS conference takes place in Budapest. The programme committee of the conference series consists of est- lished researchers from the region and renowned international colleagues, sh- ing the prominent rank of CEEMAS among the leading events in multi-agent systems. In the very competitive ?eld of agent oriented conferences and workshops nowadays(suchasAAMAS, WI/IAT, EUMAS, CIA, MATES)thespecialpro?le of CEEMAS is that it is trying to bridge the gap between applied research achievements and theoretical research activities. Our ambition is to provide a forum for presenting theoretical research with an evident application potential, implemented application prototypes and their properties, as well as industrial case studies of successful (but also unsuccessful) agent technology deployments. This is why the CEEMAS proceedings volume provides a collection of research and application papers. The technical research paper section of the proceedings (see pages 11-499) contains pure research papers as well as research results in application settings while the application papers section (see pages 500-530) contains papers focused on application aspects. The goal is to demonstrate the real life value and commercial reality of multi-agent systems as well as to foster communication between academia and industry in this ?

The challenge faced in today s manufacturing and business environments is the question of how to satisfy increasingly stringent customer requirements while managing growing system complexity. For example, customers expect high-quality, customizable, low-cost products that can be delivered quickly. The systems that deliver these expectations are by nature distributed, concurrent, and stochastic, and, as a result, increasingly difficult to manage. Unfortunately, the traditional hierarchical, strictly centralized approach to control used in these domains is characteristically inflexible, fragile, and difficult to maintain. These shortcomings have led to the development of a new class of manufacturing and supply-chain decision-making approaches in recent years. Solutions based on these approaches usually explore a set of highly distributed decision-making units that are capable of autonomous operations while cooperating interactively to resolve larger problems. The units, referred to as agents in classical computer science and software engineering, or holons if physically integrated with the manufacturing hardware, interact by exchanging information. These units are motivated by arriving at local solutions as well as collaborating and sharing resources and goals in solving the overall problem in question collectively."

The refereed proceedings of the International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, CEEMAS 2003, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in June 2003. The 58 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 109 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on formal methods, social knowledge and meta-reasoning, negotiation, and policies, ontologies and languages, planning, coalitions, evolution and emergent behaviour, platforms, protocols, security, real-time and synchronization, industrial applications, e-business and virtual enterprises, and Web and mobile agents.

For the sixth time, the German special interest group on Distributed Arti?cial Intelligence in cooperation with the Steering Committee of MATES organized the German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies - MATES 2008. This conference, which took place during September 23-26, 2008 in Kaisersla- ern, followed a series of successful predecessor conferences in Erfurt (2003, 2004, and 2006), Koblenz (2005), and Leipzig (2007). MATES 2008 was co-located with the 31st German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI 2008) and was hosted by the University of Kaiserslautern and the German Research Center for Arti?cial Intelligence (DFKI). As in recent years, MATES 2008 provided a distinguished, lively, and - terdisciplinary forum for researchers, users, and developers of agent technology to present and discuss the latest advances of research and development in the area of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Accordingly, the topics of MATES 2008 covered the whole range: from the theory to applications of agent and multiagent technology. In all, 35 papers were submitted from authors from 11 countries. The accepted 16 full papers included in this proceedings volume and presented as talks at the conference were chosen based on a thorough and highly selective review process. Each paper was reviewed and discussed by at least three Program Committee members and revised according to their c- ments. We believe that the papers of this volume are a representative snapshot of current research and contribute to both theoretical and applied aspects of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

PAAMS, the International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is the international yearly tribune to present, to discuss, and to disseminate the latest developments and the most important outcomes related to real-world applications. It provides a unique opportunity to bring multi-disciplinary experts, academics and practitioners together to exchange their experience in the development of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

This volume presents the papers that have been accepted for the 2011 edition. These articles capture the most innovative results and this year 's trends: Finance and Trading, Information Systems and Organisations, Leisure Culture and Interactions, Medicine and Cloud Computing, Platforms and Adaptation, Robotics and Manufacturing, Security and Privacy, Transports and Optimisation paper.