High communication efforts and poor problem solving results due to restricted overview are two central issues in collaborative problem solving. This work addresses these issues by introducing the processes of agent melting and agent splitting that enable individual problem solving agents to continually and autonomously reconfigure and adapt themselves to the particular problem to be solved.

The author provides a sound theoretical foundation of collaborative problem solving itself and introduces various new design concepts and techniques to improve its quality and efficiency, such...

The present volume of Springer s Lecture Notes in Arti cial Intelligence" - cuses on the challenge of balancing between the two extremes of pure reactivity and in-depth social deliberation in the context of multi-agent systems. Finding a balance between these two extremes will lead to an overall behavior of the individual agents and of the multi-agent system that meets the demands of the environment but also the demand for high-quality problem solving results. This book collects selected and revised papers from Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-Agent Systems"{aworkshop...