This book presents a coherent and well-balanced survey of recent advances in software engineering approaches to the design and analysis of realistic large-scale multi-agent systems (MAS). The chapters included are devoted to various techniques and methods used to cope with the complexity of real-world MAS. Reflecting the importance of agent properties in today's software systems, the power of agent-based software engineering is illustrated using examples that are representative of successful applications.

The 15 thoroughly reviewed and revised full papers are organized in topical sections on context-awareness, coordination, dependability, modeling, as well as requirements and software architecture. Most of the papers were initially presented at the 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems, SELMAS 2005, held in Saint Louis, MO, USA in May 2005 in association with ICSE 2005. Other papers were invited to describe the most recent developments in the field of software engineering for multi-agent systems.