Search

Summary: Many people live in rural areas in tropical regions. Rural development is not merely a contribution to the growth of individual countries. It can be a way to reduce poverty and to increase access to water, health care, and education. Sustainable rural development can also help stop deforestation and reduce livestock, which generate most of the greenhouse gas emissions. However, efforts to achieve a sustainable rural development are often thwarted by floods, drought, heat waves, and hurricanes, which local communities are not very prepared to tackle. Agricultural practices and local planning are still not very risk-informed. These deficiencies are particularly acute in tropical regions, where many Least Developed Countries are located and where there is, however, great potential for rural development. This Special Issue contains 22 studies on best practices for risk awareness; on local risk reduction; on several cases of soil depletion, water pollution, and sustainable access to safe water; and on agronomy, earth sciences, ecology, economy, environmental engineering, geomatics, materials science, and spatial and regional planning in 12 tropical countries.

Summary: Research on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems has matured during the past decade, and many effective applications of this technology are currently being deployed. Although computational approaches for multi-agent systems have mainly emerged in the past few decades, scholars have been prolific with regard to the variety of methods proposed to solve this paradigm. Different communities have emerged with multi-agent systems as their main research topic. Multi-agent systems allow the development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. Systems of this kind play a crucial role in life, evidenced by the broad range of applied areas involved in their use, including manufacturing, management sciences, e-commerce, and biotechnology. There are many reasons for the interest of researchers in this new discipline. Firstly, computational systems have gradually shifted towards a distributed paradigm where heterogeneous entities with different goals can enter and leave the system dynamically and interact with each other. Secondly, new computational systems should be able to negotiate with one another, typically on the behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. As a consequence, autonomy, interaction, mobility, and openness are key concepts studied in the area. The purpose of this book is to document some of the advances made in this paradigm and attempt to show the current state of this technology by analyzing different aspects in addition its possible application in various domains. This review of the current state-of-the-art does not intend to make an exhaustive exploration of all the current existing works but, rather, to try to give an overview of the research in agent technology, showing the high level of activity of this area.