Agent-based approach to economic and social complex systems

The special issue of New Generation Computing consists of one survey paper and six contributed papers, which contribute a new emergent field of computer sciences: agent-based modeling to economic and social complex systems. The word 'agent' has various meanings in the computer sciences. In this issue, the word means small software agents for simulation studies with internal states and decision models with which they are able to interact each other in a given static and/or dynamic environment in order to uncover complex economic and social phenomena. Recent software technology has matured to attack complex economic and social problems which require collective information processing with a large collection of autonomous and heterogeneous agents. Researchers on the field have increased the awareness of the members of the community concerning the following three basic issues: