This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2006, held in Dublin, Ireland. The 22 revised full papers are organized in topical sections on agent oriented system development, methodologies for agent societies, deliberative agents and social aspect, agent oriented simulation, adaptive systems, coordination, negotiation, protocols, and agents, networks and ambient intelligence.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2007, held in Athens, Greece, in October 2007. The 19 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book. The papers are organized in topical sections on electronic institutions, models of complex distributed systems with agents and societies; interaction in agent societies; engineering social intelligence in multi-agent systems; trust and reputation in agent societies; analysis, design and development of agent societies.

The fourth internationalworkshop,“EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World” (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on “Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration” of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment,suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum.

The only book to present the synergy between modeling and simulation, systems engineering, and agent technologies expands the notion of agent-based simulation to also deal with agent simulation and agent-supported simulation. Accessible to both practitioners and managers, it systematically addresses designing and building agent systems from a systems engineering perspective.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2001, held in Prague, Czech Republic in July 2001. The 12 revised full papers presented together with a survey by the volume editors were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of engineering with agents, logics and languages for MAS engineering, and agent middleware and applications.

"This book aims at giving a complete panorama of the active and promising crossing area between traffic engineering and multi-agent system addressing both current status and challenging new ideas"--Provided by publisher.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2004, held in Toulouse, France, in October 2004. The 23 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and were carefully selected from 48 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on roles, organizations, and institutions for agents; social issues in multi-agent systems; cooperation and collective behavior in agent societies; methodologies and platforms for agent-oriented engineering; agent-oriented simulation; and models for multi-agent systems.

Argumentation is all around us. Letters to the Editor often make points of cons- tency, and “Why” is one of the most frequent questions in language, asking for r- sons behind behaviour. And argumentation is more than ‘reasoning’ in the recesses of single minds, since it crucially involves interaction. It cements the coordinated social behaviour that has allowed us, in small bands of not particularly physically impressive primates, to dominate the planet, from the mammoth hunt all the way up to organized science. This volume puts argumentation on the map in the eld of Arti cial Intelligence. This theme has been coming for a while, and some famous pioneers are chapter authors, but we can now see a broader systematic area emerging in the sum of topics and results. As a logician, I nd this intriguing, since I see AI as ‘logic continued by other means’, reminding us of broader views of what my discipline is about. Logic arose originally out of re ection on many-agent practices of disputation, in Greek Ant- uity, but also in India and China. And logicians like me would like to return to this broader agenda of rational agency and intelligent interaction. Of course, Aristotle also gave us a formal systems methodology that deeply in uenced the eld, and eventually connected up happily with mathematical proof and foundations.

Contains papers which were presented at the 10th anniversary of the International Conference of the ACIA (CCIA'07) in Sant Julia de Loria (Andorra), October 25-26th, 2007. This book is intended for those computer scientists or engineers who are interested in artificial intelligence."

The characteristics of software systems are undergoing dramatic changes. We are moving rapidly into the age of ubiquitous information services. Persistent computing systems are being embedded in everyday objects. They interact in an autonomouswaywith eachother to provideus with increasinglycomplexservices and functionalities that we can access at any time from anywhere. As a con- quence, not only do the numbers of components of software systems increase; there is also a strong qualitative impact. Software systems are increasingly made up of autonomous, proactive, networked components. These interact with each other in patterns and via mechanisms that can hardly be modeled in terms of classical models of interaction or service-oriented coordination. To some extent, future software systems will exhibit characteristics making them more res- blant of natural systems and societies than of mechanical systems and software architectures. This situation poses exciting challenges to computer scientists and software engineers. Already, software agents and multi-agent systems are recognized as both useful abstractions and e?ective technologies for the modeling and building of complex distributed applications. However, little is done with regard to e?- tive and methodic development of complex software systems in terms of mul- agent societies. An urgent need exists for novel approaches to software modeling and software engineering that enable the successful deployment of software s- tems made up ofa massive number ofautonomous components, and that allowus to control and predict their behaviour.