Infrastructure and Requirements for Building Research-Grade Multi-Agent Systems -- MAS Infrastructure Definitions, Needs, and Prospects -- Tools for Developing and Monitoring Agents in Distributed Multi-agent Systems -- Agora: An Infrastructure for Cooperative Work Support in Multi-Agent Systems -- Sensible Agent Testbed Infrastructure for Experimentation -- The MadKit Agent Platform Architecture -- An Architecture for Modeling Internet-based Collaborative Agent Systems -- Frameworks for Reasoning about Agent Based System -- Integrating High-Level and Detailed Agent Coordination into a Layered Architecture -- Adaptive Infrastructures for Agent Integration -- RoboCup Soccer Server and CMUnited: Implemented Infrastructure for MAS Research -- An Agent Infrastructure to Build and Evaluate Multi-Agent Systems: The Java Agent Framework and Multi-Agent System Simulator -- Design-to-Criteria Scheduling: Real-Time Agent Control -- Integrating Conversational Interaction and Constraint Based Reasoning in an Agent Building Shell -- An Enabling Environment for Engineering Cooperative Agents -- Agent Mobility and Reification of Computational State: An Experiment in Migration -- As Strong as Possible Agent Mobility -- An Architecture for Adaptive Web Stores -- Performance Issues and Infrastructure Scalability in Building Multi-Agent Systems -- A Performance Analysis Framework for Mobile Agent Systems -- A Layered Agent Template for Enterprise Computing -- A Community of Agents for User Support in a Problem-Solving Environment -- Scalable Mobile Agents Supporting Dynamic Composition of Functionality -- A Formal Development and Validation Methodology Applied to Agent-Based Systems -- A Proposal for Meta-learning through a MAS (Multi-agent System) -- Scalability Metrics and Analysis of Mobile Agent Systems -- Improving the Scalability of Multi-agent Systems -- Mobile Agents for Distributed Processing -- Scalability of a Transactional Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems -- Towards a Scalable Architecture for Knowledge Fusion -- Towards Validation of Specifications by Simulation -- Open Source, Standards and Scaleable Agencies -- Infrastructure Issues and Themes for Scalable Multi-agent Systems.

Building research grade multi-agent systems usually involves a broad variety of software infrastructure ingredients like planning, scheduling, coordination, communication, transport, simulation, and module integration technologies and as such constitutes a great challenge to the individual researcher active in the area. The book presents a collection of papers on approaches that will help make deployed and large scale multi-agent systems a reality. The first part focuses on available infrastructure and requirements for constructing research-grade agents and multi-agent systems. The second part deals with support in infrastructure and software development methods for multi-agent systems that can directly support coordination and management of large multi-agent communities; performance analysis and scalability techniques are needed to promote deployment of multi-agent systems to professionals in software engineering and information technology.