This monograph provides a comprehensive survey of the different approaches to coordination in societies of artificial an human agents. Setting out from a critical assessment of the state of the art, the author develops a method of structuring multi-agent applications with a mechanism called structural cooperation. Agents are equipped with expertise about their environment in order to detect and overcome specific types of problem, they make use of their social knowledge to mutually adjust their activities, and they are coerced toward coherent collective behavior through normative rules. The proposed model is formalized theoretically within game theory and realized by means of an agent architecture. It is assessed experimentally by building a prototype of a distributed decision support system for road traffic management and compared to an alternative model based on a centralized architecture.
A valuable feature of the work is that it not only promotes a well-founded formal model of coordination in artificial agent societies but also applies it in an operational software architecture organized as a society of intelligent agents to solve real-world problems.
