DAI researchers and technology makers are paving the way towards new worlds to build, where a multitude of independent entities interact within artificial societies pursuing goals on our behalf, both as individuals and as groups. Applications and systems built as societies of autonomous and intelligent agents promise to provide computer scientists and engineers with the expressive and computational power to tackle levels of complexity never reached before.

In this context, MAS are going far beyond the boundaries of DAI, by rapidly evolving into an independent research field, which gathers contributions from many different and heterogeneous areas such as Distributed Systems, Social & Cognitive Sciences, Mobile Computing, and so on. In particular, MAS engineering may actually represent the next frontier for the design and development of complex software systems, by providing agents and societies as powerful abstractions for decomposing tasks, modelling complex domains, and embedding intelligence into real-world applications.

However, many relevant results of the research on agents and MAS either concern intra-agent aspects, or do not put emphasis enough on the fact that agents of a MAS live dipped into societies: this leads to a lack of suitable, specific methodologies for the design and development of well-engineered agent societies. Thus, there is an urgent need not only for theoretical foundations making MAS conceptual setting clear, but also for specific methodologies driving MAS design, for specific technologies and processes driving MAS development, and for powerful and manageable infrastructures making MAS a viable approach to embed intelligence into applications.

The workshop is devoted to discuss technologies, methodologies and models for the engineering of complex applications based on multiagent systems (MAS), by bringing together researchers and contributions from both within and outside the DAI field -- from the Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, Social Sciences, and so on --, so as to promote cross-fertilisation. By focussing on the social aspects of MAS, ESAW'00 concentrates on the space of agent interaction, rather than on intra-agent issues, and on the technology and methodology issues rather than on the pure theoretical aspects.