Ideal and real belief about belief: Some intuitions -- Emotions as commitments operators: A foundation for control structure in multi-agents systems -- A logical and operational model of scalable knowledge- and perception-based agents -- AgentSpeak(L): BDI agents speak out in a logical computable language -- A methodology and modelling technique for systems of BDI agents -- Formalising the Contract Net as a goal-directed system -- A coordination algorithm for Multi-Agent planning -- Modelling approach and tool for designing protocols for automated cooperation in multi-agent systems -- Analyzing the social behavior of Contract Net Protocol -- Effects of different interaction attitudes on a multi-agent system performance -- Bacterial Evolution Algorithm for rapid adaptation -- Distributed interaction with computon -- SIGMA: Application of Multi-Agent Systems to Cartographic Generalization -- A decision-theoretic model for cooperative transportation scheduling -- A real-time agent model in an asynchronous-object environment -- Coalition formation among rational information agents -- Cooperating agents implementing distributed patient management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, MAAMAW '96, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands in January 1996. The concept of agents comprises physical as well as software agents; it emerged at the crossroads of distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and embedded systems. Multi-agent systems are foundational for new models of computing and interaction addressing large-scale open distributed platforms like the World-Wide Web. The 17 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 51 submissions; they are organized in sections on epistemological and ontological issues, frameworks and architectures, interaction and coordination, emergence, and task-specific analysis.