Agents Breaking Away

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Workshop on Modelling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, MAAMAW '96, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands in January 1996. The concept of agents comprises physical as well as software agents; it emerged at the crossroads of distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and embedded systems. Multi-agent systems are foundational for new models of computing and interaction addressing large-scale open distributed platforms like the World-Wide Web. The 17 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 51 submissions; they are organized in sections on epistemological and ontological issues, frameworks and architectures, interaction and coordination, emergence, and task-specific analysis.