With the integration of computing and communication into the very fabric of our social, economic, and personal existence, the manner in which we think about and build software has become the subject of intense intellectual, scientific, and engineering reexamination. New computing paradigms have been proposed and new software architectures are being examined. The study of multi-agent systems (MAS) is one important movement energized by a growing awareness that application development may need to follow radically new paths. Fundamentally, MAS denotes a new software specification and design paradigm. Moreover, when viewed in the context of large-scale deployment, it emerges as the embodiment of the quintessential concerns facing the software engineering community today. As computing and communication permeates the essential aspects of the societal infrastructure, software must become more nimble, slimmer, more natural, and more discrete. Software must integrate itself in an organic way into the activities it serves and the resources it exploits.