Dear Colleagues,

Research work on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) has steadily matured over the preceding decades. Many effective applications of the resulting technologies have actually been deployed, a fact which has enabled the development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and highly dynamic environments. Systems of this sort play a crucial role in people’s everyday lives, as evidenced by the broad range of applications relying on agent-based solutions, including manufacturing, management sciences, e-commerce, biotechnology, healthcare, etc.

The field of MAS is a strongly inter-disciplinary research area of interest to highly heterogeneous communities. This is evidenced by the many events and publications fostering the application of MAS to specific business domains, not to mention the convergence of research in logics, automated learning, planning, software engineering, and other disciplines contributing to the very notion of agent technology.

There are many reasons for researchers to be interested in this discipline. Firstly, computational systems have gradually shifted towards a distributed paradigm where heterogeneous entities with different goals can enter and leave the system dynamically and interact with each other. Secondly, computational systems should be able to negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. As a consequence, autonomy, interaction, mobility, and openness are key concepts in this area of study.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to advance the field MAS by heightening its visibility and enhancing its accessibility to the scientific community. We aim to illustrate the current state of the technologies that have come from the development of MAS systems by analyzing all the relevant scientific and technical aspects, as well as their possible application to various domains. This review of the current state-of-the-art is not intended to be an exhaustive exploration of all existing works, but rather aims to give an overview of the current research in agent and MAS technology and highlight the high level of activity of this area.

Prof. Dr. Andrea Omicini
Dr. Stefano Mariani
Guest Editors

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• human–robot–agent interaction;
• learning and adaptation in multi-agent systems;
• methodologies for agent-based systems;
• multi-robot systems;
• negotiation and conflict resolution in multi-agent systems;
• norms for multi-agent systems;
• institutions for multi-agent systems;
• reasoning in agent-based systems;
• self-organization in multi-agent systems;
• multi-agent planning;
• agent-based socio-technical systems;
• trust and reputation in multi-agent systems;
• agents applied to cyber–physical systems (as the Internet of Things);
• convergence of blockchain (and smart contract) and multi-agent systems technology;
• convergence of agents and machine learning techniques.