Objective Coordination in Multiagent System Engineering

Probalistic reasoning with graphical models, also known as Bayesian networks or belief networks, has become an active field of research and practice in artifical intelligence, operations research and statistics in the last two decades. The success of this technique in modeling intelligent decision support systems under the centralized and single-agent paradim has been striking. In this book, the author extends graphical dependence models to the distributed and multi-agent paradigm. He identifies the major technical challenges involved in such an endeavor and presents the results gleaned from a decade's research.

This book describes how evolutionary algorithms (EA), including genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be utilized for solving multi-objective optimization problems in the area of embedded and VLSI system design. Many complex engineering optimization problems can be modelled as multi-objective formulations. This book provides an introduction to multi-objective optimization using meta-heuristic algorithms, GA and PSO and how they can be applied to problems like hardware/software partitioning in embedded systems, circuit partitioning in VLSI, design of operational amplifiers in analog VLSI, design space exploration in high-level synthesis, delay fault testing in VLSI testing and scheduling in heterogeneous distributed systems.