The ninth annual international workshop Engineering Societies in the Agents' World was hosted by the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne (ENSM-SE), France, in September 2008. The workshop was organized as a stand-alone event, r- ning over three days. ESAW 2008 built upon the success of prior ESAW workshops: ESAW 2007 held in Athens, ESAW 2006 held in Dublin, and ESAW 2005 held in Kus, adasi, going back to ?rst edition of the workshop which was held in Berlin in 2000. ESAW 2007 was attended by 60 participants from 12 different countries. Each pres- tation was followed by...

Adaptation, for purposes of self-healing, self-protection, self-management, or self-regulation, is currently considered to be one of the most challenging pr- erties of distributed systems that operate in dynamic, unpredictable, and - tentially hostile environments. Engineering for adaptation is particularly c- plicated when the distributed system itself is composed of autonomous entities that, on one hand, may act collaboratively and with benevolence, and, on the other, maybehavesel?shlywhilepursuingtheirowninterests.Still, theseentities have to coordinate themselves in order to adapt...