Nowadays, engineering large-scale software systems means dealing with complex systems composed of pervasive software components that move around and adapt to nondeterministic and open environments, like the Internet, in order to achieve systems design goals through the coordination of autonomously distributed services. The agent metaphor, in particular software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), constitutes a promising approach for covering most of the software development life cycle, from conceptual modeling and requirements specification to architectural definition, design, and implementation.

This book presents 17 carefully reviewed papers arranged in order to provide a coherent survey of how to exploit agent properties and MAS issues in today's software systems. The book offers the following topical sections:

- software engineering foundations

- requirements engineering and software architecture

- coordination and mobility

- reuse

-dependability

-empirical studies and applications