# Multi-Agent Systems
## 4 MAS in Ambient Intelligence  
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) was built to respond to the technological call to monitor and act in the homes of people with disabilities. Its aim was to create a nest of sensor systems that together could provide more information than alone, thus transforming data into knowledge [13; 14; 15]. This is achieved by incorporating digital environments that are sensitive to people's needs, can respond to their requirements, anticipate behaviors, and adjust the response accordingly. In the last few years, several projects have been developed to attend to the needs of the AmI, being very recently under the focus of the industry, a result of the advances of the sensor systems and their decrease of cost, as well as the introduction into mobile devices. Furthermore, the advances of the Internet of Things (IoT) have introduced a new hypothesis of communicating with the home appliances and, above all, introducing them in the home network where they can be remotely controlled [16; 17; 18].  
Over the last few years, MAS have been employed as a tool for the development of many AmI frameworks. As examples, we can highlight the iGendaframework [19; 20], which has as its main goal providing intelligent event management, consisting of a platform that receives events from other users and tries to schedule them according to its importance, having the ability to create, move, and delete events. Moreover, aiming for the implementation of the active aging concept, it schedules ludic activities in the users' free time, adjusted to their medical conditions, user shared events being the last implemented feature. Another example is ALZ-MAS [21], which consists of an Ambient Intelligence framework based on multi-agent technology aimed at enhancing the assistance and health care for Alzheimer patients.  
In this Special Issue, three new contributions in this area have been presented. The first one [22] presented a tool, the goal of which is to assist in creating a work environment that is adapted to the needs of people with disabilities. The tool measures the degree of accessibility in the place of work and identifies the architectural barriers of the environment by considering the activities carried out by workers. A case study was conducted to assess the performance of the system, analyzing the accessibility of the different jobs in a real company. Although the tool was initially conceived of for the detection of accessibility problems in office environments, it can be considered a valid tool for the simulation of any agent production process representing human beings in the field of office environments.  
The second contribution [23] explored the representation of user interaction levels using an intelligent hybrid system approach with agents. The authors considered the use of an intelligent hybrid approach to provide a decision-making system to an agent that self-evaluates interactions in interactive modules in a museum exhibition. The main goal of this work was to provide a solution to the problem of overcrowding in museums, making museums smart spaces with multi-user adaptive interaction exhibitions. As a case study, the authors built software agents that represented a high-level abstraction of a gallery, specifically an interactive exhibition module in a real museum in Mexico.  
Finally, the third work [24] presented CogHelper, which is an orientation system for people with cognitive disabilities. The main idea is that using this system, people with cognitive disabilities may have a more active life, reducing the worry of getting lost both indoors and outdoors. CogHelper will guide users taking into consideration his preferences. To achieve this behavior, the proposed system applies a speculative computation module [25], which needs to be loaded by the traveling path before its execution. For the moment, the system is just a prototype, and authors will test the entire system in real case scenarios in the near future.