With the proliferation of consumer devices, computation is becoming truly ubiquitous.
Multi-agent systems hold the promise to enable utilization of these computational
resources for ground-breaking new applications. However, as the number of
agents involved inmulti-agent computations rises, traditional approaches of building
multi-agent systems fail to scale. Massively multi-agent systems address this
challenge of scale. Massive, in this context, is meant to capture the complexity
of such systems, which precludes decision making to focus on individual agents.
Agents making decisions have to reduce the complexity of the space in which they
must decide. The focus, therefore, is on the approaches to manage the complexity,
implications of this abstraction, as well as on identifying ways of applying the
paradigm to problems.