Agent engineering

Agent engineering concerns the development of autonomous computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating and delegating in a dynamic environment. It is one of the most promising areas of research and development in information technology, computer science and engineering. This book addresses some of the key issues in agent engineering: what is meant by "autonomous agents"?; how can we build agents with autonomy?; what are the desirable capabilities of agents with respect to surviving (they will not die) and living (they will furthermore enjoy their being or existence?); how can agents cooperate among themselves?; and in order to achieve the optimal performance at the global level, how much optimization at the local, individual level and how much at the global level would be necessary?