Special issue on knowledge integration and management in autonomous systems

It is important that software that operates over modern computer infrastructure adopt accordingly, to provide highly customised services to everyone who needs them. New requirements have to be met, for example the systems must still evolve and integrate many heterogeneous systems. Furthermore, the systems must cope with changes in network topology, node failures, collaborations and cooperation between different types of customized knowledge. As information systems get more complex, it becomes more difficult to integrate those using traditional approaches. Over recent years there has been a significant increase in interest in autonomous, self-organisation applications that undertake problem solving based on distributed interactions between uncoupled components, i.e. SOA, MAS. Many issues such as fuzzy, nature-inspired methodologies and hybridisation of these methods still remain open. The aim of this special issue is to highlight an on-going research on different methodological and technological approaches of self-organization and knowledge integration together with their applications on various domains. The papers cover some of the most important aspects of knowledge integration and management in autonomous systems and can serve as a reference point for this exciting area. In particular, they describe automated multi-issue bilateral negotiations and negotiation protocols, ontology mapping composition for query transformation, constructing and mining a semantic-based academic social network, solar cell monitoring and how swarm-based multi-agent systems cab be designed using MaSE methodology. The papers in this issue have been reviewed by prominent experts in this field. As the result of thorough review process, we have selected six papers for final publication. The first paper by Lopez-Carmona et al. titled “Improving trade-offs in automated bilateral negotiations for expressive and inexpressive scenarios” presents three new mechanisms to improve the similarity-based trade-off algorithm for win-win solutions. Two of them are applicable in expressive scenarios, where agents may be willing to share preference information, while the third one is intended for inexpressive scenarios. To validate their hypotheses and evaluate the effects of their contributions, they have performed single shot experiments, testing isolated runs of the proposed mechanisms. The following paper, titled “Secure and efficient protocols for multiple interdependent issues negotiation”, by Fujita, Ito and Klein also concerns an important problem in multi-issue negotiation in which agent utility functions are nonlinear. The authors propose Distributed Mediator Protocol and Take it or Leave it Protocol for negotiation that can reach agreements and completely conceal agents’ private information. Moreover, they propose Hybrid Secure Protocol that combines Distributed Mediator Protocol with Take it or Leave it Protocol and achieves high optimality and uses less communication cost in both cone-constraints and cube-constraints situations. The third paper by Jung titled “An empirical study on optimizing query transformation on semantic peerto-peer networks” analyses how to make the existing mapping information sharable and exchangeable. It means that we can collect the existing mapping information and aggregate them. Consequently, we can estimate the ontology mappings in an indirect manner. To evaluate the performance of sharing and composing mapping results, a multi-agent platform has been employed. Any two heterogeneous agents can communicate with each other by query-answering process,