Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems IV - COIN 2008 International Workshops COIN@AAMAS 2008, Estoril, Portugal, May 12, 2008 COIN@AAAI 2008, Chicago, USA, July 14, 2008, Revised Selected Papers (Paperback, 2009 ed.)

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are often understood as complex entities where a multitude of agents interact, usually with some intended individual or collective goals.Such a view usually assumessomeform of organization, or set of norms or conventions that articulate or restrain interactions in order to make them more e?ective, certain, or predictable for participants. Engineering e?ective coordi- tion or regulatory mechanisms is a key problem for the design of open complex multi-agent systems. In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research especially in applications on service-oriented c- puting, grid computing and ambient intelligence. These applications enforce the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within these en- ronments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands on traditional MAS interaction models. Therefore, the view of coordination and controlhasto be expanded to consider not onlyan agent-centricperspective but also societal and organization-centric views. However, agent autonomy is often needed for concretely implementing social order, because autonomousagents can intelligently adapt the designedorgani- tion to particular cases and can face unpredicted events. From this perspective autonomy can also be a possible source of internal change in the designed or- nizational constructs. Di?erently, autonomous behavior can also originate forms of self-organizationwhich emerge out of local interactions and are only partially externally programmed. In such situations the self-organized order and the - ternally designed organization can even be in con?ic