Organizational design plays a critical role in the development of larger and more complex multi-agent systems (MAS). As systems grow to include hundreds or thousands of agents, those in the field must move from an agent-centric view of coordination and control to an organization-centric one. ""The Handbook of Research on Multi-Agent Systems: Semantics and Dynamics of Organizational Models"" brings together views and approaches from different communities including MAS, computational organizational simulation, social simulation, organizational theory, and cognitive science, to present the intersections of the different topics. Containing chapters by renowned international authors, this book provides a comprehensive volume on the state-of-the-art on formal semantic models and practical applications for dynamic formalisms of agent organizations. This title offers: 23 authoritative contributions by over 50 of the world's leading experts on multi-agent systems from 11 countries; comprehensive coverage of each specific topic, highlighting recent trends and describing the latest advances in the field; more than 880 references to existing literature and research on multi-agent systems; a compendium of over 150 key terms with detailed definitions. This title is organized by topic and indexed, making it a convenient method of reference for all IT/IS scholars and professionals. It features cross-referencing of key terms, figures, and information pertinent to multi-agent systems and free institution-wide access to the online version with the purchase of the print publication.

This book addresses the question of how to achieve social coordination in Socio-Cognitive Technical Systems (SCTS). SCTS are a class of Socio-Technical Systems that are complex, open, systems where several humans and digital entities interact in order to achieve some collective endeavour. The book approaches the question from the conceptual background of regulated open multiagent systems, with the question being motivated by their design and construction requirements. The book captures the collective effort of eight groups from leading research centres and universities, each of which has developed a conceptual framework for the design of regulated multiagent systems and most have also developed technological artefacts that support the processes from specification to implementation of that type of systems. The first, introductory part of the book describes the challenge of developing frameworks for SCTS and articulates the premises and the main concepts involved in those frameworks. The second part discusses the eight frameworks and contrasts their main components. The final part maps the new field by discussing the types of activities in which SCTS are likely to be used, the features that such uses will exhibit, and the challenges that will drive the evolution of this field.

In this book, the author examines the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence systems as they integrate and replace traditional social structures in new sociocognitive-technological environments. She discusses issues related to the integrity of researchers, technologists, and manufacturers as they design, construct, use, and manage artificially intelligent systems; formalisms for reasoning about moral decisions as part of the behavior of artificial autonomous systems such as agents and robots; and design methodologies for social agents based on societal, moral, and legal values. Throughout the book the author discusses related work, conscious of both classical, philosophical treatments of ethical issues and the implications in modern, algorithmic systems, and she combines regular references and footnotes with suggestions for further reading. This short overview is suitable for undergraduate students, in both technical and non-technical courses, and for interested and concerned researchers, practitioners, and citizens.

The 10th international workshop "Engineering Societies in the Agents' World" (ESAW 2009), was held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, during November 18-20, 2009. In the tradition of its predecessors, ESAW 2009 was committed to the idea of multi-agent systems (MAS) as highly interconnected societies of agents, paying particular attention to the social aspects, methodologies and software infrastructures that tackle the emergent complexities of MAS. The idea for the ESAW workshop series was born 10 years ago, in 1999, among the members of the working group on "Communication, Coordination and Collaboration" of AgentLink, the 1st European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, out of a critical discussion about the general mi- set of the agents community. Central to this discussion is the need for proper consideration of systematic aspects of MAS, acknowledging the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach, that takes into account the social, environmental and technological perspectives. These issues that are as actual today as they were in 1999, which is con?rmed by the steady interest in the ESAW workshop series that previous editions took place in: - Berlin, Germany, 2000 (LNAI 1972) - Prague, Czech Republic, 2001 (LNAI 2203) - Madrid, Spain, 2002 (LNAI 2577) - London, UK, 2003 (LNAI 3071) - Toulouse, France, 2004 (LNAI 3451) - Kusadasi, Turkey, 2005 (LNAI 3963) - Dublin, Ireland, 2006 (LNAI 4457) - Athens, Greece, 2007 (LNAI 4995) - Saint-Etienne, France, 2008 (LNAI 5485) This10thworkshopwasdevotedtothediscussionoftechnologies,methodologies and models for the engineering of complex applications based on MAS, and broughttogetherresearchersandcontributionsfrombothwithinandoutsidethe agents'?eld-fromsoftwareengineering,distributedsystems,socialsciences,and

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are often understood as complex entities where a multitude of agents interact, usually with some intended individual or collective goals.Such a view usually assumessomeform of organization, or set of norms or conventions that articulate or restrain interactions in order to make them more e?ective, certain, or predictable for participants. Engineering e?ective coordi- tion or regulatory mechanisms is a key problem for the design of open complex multi-agent systems. In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research especially in applications on service-oriented c- puting, grid computing and ambient intelligence. These applications enforce the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within these en- ronments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands on traditional MAS interaction models. Therefore, the view of coordination and controlhasto be expanded to consider not onlyan agent-centricperspective but also societal and organization-centric views. However, agent autonomy is often needed for concretely implementing social order, because autonomousagents can intelligently adapt the designedorgani- tion to particular cases and can face unpredicted events. From this perspective autonomy can also be a possible source of internal change in the designed or- nizational constructs. Di?erently, autonomous behavior can also originate forms of self-organizationwhich emerge out of local interactions and are only partially externally programmed. In such situations the self-organized order and the - ternally designed organization can even be in con?ic

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN 2006, held as two events at AAMAS 2006, the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in Hakodate, Japan, and ECAI 2006, the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Riva del Garda, Italy.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Agents, Norms and Institutions for Regulated Multiagent Systems, ANIREM 2005, and the International Workshop on Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems, OOOP 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 2005. This is the first volume in a new series on issues in Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms (COIN) in multi-agent systems. Topics include modeling, analyzing and programming organizations and more.

In this book, we present a collection of papers around the topic of Agent- Mediated Knowledge Management. Most of the papers are extended and - provedversions of work presented at the symposium on Agent-Mediated Kno- edge Management held during the AAAI Spring Symposia Series in March 2003 at Stanford University. The aim of the Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management symposium was to bring together researchers and practitioners of the ?elds of KM and agent te- nologiestodiscussthebene?ts, possibilitiesandadded-valueofcross-fertilization. Knowledge Management (KM) has been a predominant trend in bu- ness in recent years. Not only is Knowledge Management an important ?eld of applicationfor AIandrelatedtechniques, suchasCBRtechnologyforintelligent lessons-learned systems, it also provides new challenges to the AI community, like, for example, context-aware knowledge delivery. Scaling up research pro- typestoreal-worldsolutionsusuallyrequiresanapplication-drivenintegrationof several basic technologies, e.g., ontologies for knowledge sharing and reuse, c- laboration support like CSCW systems, and personalized information services. Typical characteristics to be dealt with in such an integration are: - manifold, logically and physically dispersed actors and knowledge sources, - di?erent degrees of formalization of knowledge, - di?erent kinds of (Web-based) services and (legacy) systems, - con?icts between local (individual) and global (group or organizational) goal

In this book, the author examines the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence systems as they integrate and replace traditional social structures in new sociocognitive-technological environments. She discusses issues related to the integrity of researchers, technologists, and manufacturers as they design, construct, use, and manage artificially intelligent systems; formalisms for reasoning about moral decisions as part of the behavior of artificial autonomous systems such as agents and robots; and design methodologies for social agents based on societal, moral, and legal values. Throughout the book the author discusses related work, conscious of both classical, philosophical treatments of ethical issues and the implications in modern, algorithmic systems, and she combines regular references and footnotes with suggestions for further reading. This short overview is suitable for undergraduate students, in both technical and non-technical courses, and for interested and concerned researchers, practitioners, and citizens.

This book addresses the question of how to achieve social coordination in Socio-Cognitive Technical Systems (SCTS). SCTS are a class of Socio-Technical Systems that are complex, open, systems where several humans and digital entities interact in order to achieve some collective endeavour. The book approaches the question from the conceptual background of regulated open multiagent systems, with the question being motivated by their design and construction requirements. The book captures the collective effort of eight groups from leading research centres and universities, each of which has developed a conceptual framework for the design of regulated multiagent systems and most have also developed technological artefacts that support the processes from specification to implementation of that type of systems. The first, introductory part of the book describes the challenge of developing frameworks for SCTS and articulates the premises and the main concepts involved in those frameworks. The second part discusses the eight frameworks and contrasts their main components. The final part maps the new field by discussing the types of activities in which SCTS are likely to be used, the features that such uses will exhibit, and the challenges that will drive the evolution of this field.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th International Workshops on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN 2015. The workshops were co-located with AAMAS 2015, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in May 2015, and with IJCAI 2015, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 2015. The 23 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 initial submissions for inclusion in this volume. The papers cover a wide range of topics from work on formal aspects of normative and team based systems, to software engineering with organizational concepts, to applications of COIN based systems, and to philosophical issues surrounding socio-technical systems. They highlight not only the richness of existing work in the field, but also point out the challenges and exciting research that remains to be done in the area.