The idea to initiate a series of workshops to be entitled Engineering Societies in the Agent s World (ESAW) originated in late 1999, among members of the working group on Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration of the Intelligent Informa tion Agents special interest group of AgentLink, the European Network of Excellence for Agent Based Computing. By that time, the convergenceof scienti?c and technolog ical progress in numerous areas, including software engineering, distributed problem solving, knowledge based systems, and dynamic pervasive networking had gained sig ni?cant momentum. As...

The 10 revised papers presented here were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion and are organized in topical sections on emerging issues in multi-agent systems engineering, co-ordination models and technologies for multi-agent systems, and methodologies and tools.

A network is a mathematical object consisting of a set of points (called vertices or nodes) that are connected to each other in some fashion by lines (called edges). Turns out this simple description corresponds to a bewildering array of systems in the real world, ranging from technological ones such as the Internet and World Wide Web, biological networks such as that of connections of the nervous systems or blood vessels, food webs, protein interactions, infrastructural systems such as networks of roads, airports or the power-grid, to patterns of social acquaintance such as friendship,...