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.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2005. The book presents 15 revised full papers together with 3 invited papers, 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-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 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.

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.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2008, held in Saint-Etienne, France, in September 2008. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited long paper were carefully selected from 29 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on organisations and norm-governed systems, privacy and security, agent-oriented software engineering, emergence and self-organisation, as well as simulation.

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.