Special Issue “Multi-Agent Systems”: Editorial

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are built around the central notions of agents, interaction, and environment. Agents are autonomous computational entities able to pro-actively pursue goals, and re-actively adapt to environment change. In doing so, they leverage on their social and situated capabilities: interacting with peers, and perceiving / acting on the environment. The relevance of MAS is steadily growing as they are extensively and increasingly used to model, simulate, and build heterogeneous systems across many different application scenarios and business domains, ranging from logistics to social sciences, from robotics to supply chain, and more. The reason behind such a widespread and diverse adoption lies in MAS great expressive power in modelling and actually supporting operational execution of a variety of systems demanding decentralised computations, reasoning skills, and adaptiveness to change, which are a perfect fit for MAS central notions described above. This special issue gathers 11 contributions sampling the many diverse advancements that are currently ongoing in the MAS field.