The general question addressed in this book "How can human organizational principles be used for multi-agent architectures?" is answered by an exploration of the possibilities to design multi-agent systems as artificial organizations.

Key topics of this book:

- a framework for multi-agent system design, based on human organizational notions and principles for distributed intelligent systems design

- "Coordination mechanisms" in the form of "Problem Solving Methods", which can assist "Managers" and agent engineers in reasoning about coordination

- the "Five Capabilities (5C) model" which is a conceptual framework bases on a generalization of typical agent intelligence competences, such as "autonomy", "interaction", "pro-activeness" and "reactiveness"

- a multi-agent architecture capable of (semi)automatic reuse of Problem Solving Methods

- "Ontology-based communication", in which the meaning and intention of message contents in agent communication is specified in "message content ontologies".