More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.

Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments.

In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the componentsa (TM) actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure a" available with additional information under http: //www.agentgroup.unimore.it a" this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.

As information technologies become increasingly distributed and accessible to larger number of people and as commercial and government organizations are challenged to scale their applications and services to larger market shares, while reducing costs, there is demand for software methodologies and appli- tions to provide the following features: Richer application end-to-end functionality; Reduction of human involvement in the design and deployment of the software; Flexibility of software behaviour; and Reuse and composition of existing software applications and systems in novel or adaptive ways. When designing new distributed software systems, the above broad requi- ments and their translation into implementations are typically addressed by partial complementarities and overlapping technologies and this situation gives rise to significant software engineering challenges. Some of the challenges that may arise are: determining the components that the distributed applications should contain, organizing the application components, and determining the assumptions that one needs to make in order to implement distributed scalable and flexible applications, etc.

As today's most complex computing environment, the Internet confronts IT researchers, system designers, and application developers with completely new challenges and, as a fascinating new computing paradigm, agent technology has recently attracted broad interest and strong hopes for shaping the future information society. Relating both, the Internet and agents, opens up a whole new range of advanced applications in vibrant subfields of information technology such as middleware, mobile commerce, e-learning, collaborative working, and intelligent information services. Many modern advanced systems are likely to exploit Internet agents - and exploiting Internet agents mostly means dealing with coordination models and technologies of various sorts. This monograph-like anthology is the first systematic guide to models and enabling technologies for the coordination of intelligent agents on the Internet and respective applications.

This book contains revised selected and invited papers presented at the International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems, MMAS 2018, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in July 2018. The 7 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. Also included are 3 post-workshop papers. The papers discuss enabling technologies, new architectures, promising applications, and challenges of massively multi-agent systems in the era of IoT. They are organized in the following topical sections: multi-agent systems and Internet of Things; architectures for massively multi-agent systems; and applications of massively multi-agent systems.

As today's most complex computing environment, the Internet confronts IT researchers, system designers, and application developers with completely new challenges and, as a fascinating new computing paradigm, agent technology has recently attracted broad interest and strong hopes for shaping the future information society. Relating both, the Internet and agents, opens up a whole new range of advanced applications in vibrant subfields of information technology such as middleware, mobile commerce, e-learning, collaborative working, and intelligent information services. Many modern advanced systems are likely to exploit Internet agents - and exploiting Internet agents mostly means dealing with coordination models and technologies of various sorts. This monograph-like anthology is the first systematic guide to models and enabling technologies for the coordination of intelligent agents on the Internet and respective applications.

As information technologies become increasingly distributed and accessible to larger number of people and as commercial and government organizations are challenged to scale their applications and services to larger market shares, while reducing costs, there is demand for software methodologies and appli- tions to provide the following features: Richer application end-to-end functionality; Reduction of human involvement in the design and deployment of the software; Flexibility of software behaviour; and Reuse and composition of existing software applications and systems in novel or adaptive ways. When designing new distributed software systems, the above broad requi- ments and their translation into implementations are typically addressed by partial complementarities and overlapping technologies and this situation gives rise to significant software engineering challenges. Some of the challenges that may arise are: determining the components that the distributed applications should contain, organizing the application components, and determining the assumptions that one needs to make in order to implement distributed scalable and flexible applications, etc.

More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.

Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments.

In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the components' actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure - available with additional information under http: //www.agentgroup.unimore.it - this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.

Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for supporting the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers and research groups in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. The papers present leading edge research in this field, which is of critical importance in facilitating industry take-up of powerful agent technologies.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, in May 2006 as part of AAMAS 2006. The 13 revised full papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement and have been complemented by invited papers from leading researchers in the field. The papers are organized in topical sections on modelling and design of agent systems, modelling open agent systems, formal reasoning about designs, as well as testing, debugging and evolvability.

Agent and multiagent concepts offer higher level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions all of which need conceptual modeling. The AOSE 2005 workshop sought to examine the credentials of agent-based approaches as a software engineering paradigm, and to gain an insight into what agent-oriented software engineering will look like, and what its benefits will be.

This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2005 as part of AAMAS 2005. The 18 revised full papers were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling tools, analysis and validation tools, multiagent systems design, implementation tools, and experiences and comparative evaluations.

The ?rst workshop "Engineering Societies in the Agents World" (ESAW) was held in August 2000, in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2000) in Berlin. It was launched by a group of - searchers who thought that the design and development of MASs (multi-agent systems) not only needed adequate theoretical foundations but also a call for new techniques, methodologies and infrastructures to develop MASs as arti?cial societies. The second ESAW was co-located with the European Agent Summer School (ACAI 2001) in Prague, and mostly focused on logics and languages, middleware, infrastructures and applications. In Madrid, the third ESAW c- centrated on models and methodologies and took place with the "Cooperative Information Agents" workshop (CIA 2002). The fourth ESAW in London was the ?rst one that ran as a stand-alone event: apart from the usual works on methodologies and models, it also stressed the issues of applications and m- tidisciplinary models. Based on the success of previous ESAWs, and also given that the di?cult challenges in the construction of arti?cial societies are not yet fully addressed, the ?fth ESAW workshop was organized in the same spirit as its predecessors. Inparticular,ESAW2004tookplaceattheIRITlaboratoryoftheUniversit e "Paul Sabatier" (Toulouse, France), at the end of October 2004. It was not - located with any other scienti?c event, in the same way as ESAW 2003. ESAW 2004 remained committed to the use of the notion of MASs as the seeds for animated, constructive and highly interdisciplinary discussions about techno- gies,methodologiesandtoolsfortheengineeringofcomplexdistributedsystems.

As information handling systems get more and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage them using traditional approaches based on centralized and pre-defined control mechanisms. Over recent years, there has been a significant increase in taking inspiration from biology, the physical world, chemistry, and social systems to more efficiently manage such systems - generally based on the concept of self-organisation; this gave rise to self-organising applications.

This book constitutes a reference and starting point for establishing the field of engineering self-organising applications. It comprises revised and extended papers presented at the Engineering Self-Organising Applications Workshop, ESOA 2003, held at AAMAS 2003 in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2003 and selected invited papers from leading researchers in self-organisation. The book is organized in parts on applications, natural metaphors (multi-cells and genetic algorithms, stigmergy, and atoms and evolution), artificial interaction mechanisms, middleware, and methods and tools.

Nowadays, engineering large-scale software systems means dealing with complex systems composed of pervasive software components that move around and adapt to nondeterministic and open environments, like the Internet, in order to achieve systems design goals through the coordination of autonomously distributed services. The agent metaphor, in particular software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), constitutes a promising approach for covering most of the software development life cycle, from conceptual modeling and requirements specification to architectural definition, design, and implementation. This book presents 17 carefully reviewed papers arranged in order to provide a coherent survey of how to exploit agent properties and MAS issues in today's software systems. The book offers the following topical sections: - software engineering foundations - requirements engineering and software architecture - coordination and mobility - reuse -dependability -empirical studies and applications

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2003, held in Madrid, Spain in September 2002. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on views, models, engineering, and modeling and design.

These are the proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, held in Modena, Italy, September 6-8, 2001. Information agent technology has become one of the major key technologies for the Internet and the World Wide Web. It mainly emerged as a response to the challenges of cyberspace from both the technological and human user perspective. Development of information agents requires expertise from di?erent research disciplines such as Arti?cial Intelligence (AI), advanced databases and knowledge base systems, distributed information systems, information retrieval, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The ?fth international workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA) continued the tradition by capturing the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of the above research area by calling for contributions from di?erent research communities, and by promoting open and informative discussions on all related topics. In keeping with tradition, the workshop featured a sequence of regular and invited talks of excellence given by leading experts in the ?eld. This year the topics of the talks are mainly on the challenges of information agents in the upcoming age of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. These challenges are in particular due to the necessity of an e?cient utilization, evolution, and trust management of information agents for user-oriented information search, pro- sion, and visualization in networked computing environments with small, mobile, and embedded devices. A di?erent issue concerns the potential of agent-based support of massive distributed data warehousing worldwide.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2000, held in Berlin, Germany in August 2000. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book; they are organized in topical sections on emerging issues in multi-agent systems engineering, coordination models and technologies for multi-agent systems, and methodologies and tools.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, PAAMS 2014, held in Salamanca, Spain, in June 2014. The 12 revised full papers and 14 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions and are presented together with 19 demonstrations. The papers report on the application and validation of agent-based models, methods, and technologies in a number of key application areas, including: agent-oriented software engineering, conversations, motion coordination and unmanned aerial vehicles, web and service systems, robotics exploration, smart cities and infrastructures, and social systems.