Management Summary -- Management Summary -- What Agents Are and What They Are Good For -- Agents -- From Agents to Multiagent Systems -- Flexibility of Multiagent Systems -- Application Examples I: Agent.Enterprise -- Agent.Enterprise in a Nutshell -- Integrated Process Planning and Production Control -- Benchmarking of Multiagent Systems in a Production Planning and Control Environment -- Distributed Hierarchical Production Control for Wafer Fabs Using an Agent-Based System Prototype -- Supply Chain Event Management With Software Agents -- Trust-Based Distributed Supply-Web Negotiations -- Application Examples II: Agent.Hospital -- Agent.Hospital — Health Care Applications of Intelligent Agents -- Artificial Software Agents as Representatives of Their Human Principals in Operating-Room-Team-Forming -- Agent-Based Information Logistics -- Agent-Based Patient Scheduling in Hospitals -- Adaptivity and Scheduling -- Active, Medical Documents in Health Care -- Self-Organized Scheduling in Hospitals by Connecting Agents and Mobile Devices -- Agent Engineering -- The Engineering Process -- Requirements Engineering -- Interaction Design -- Architectural Design -- Semantics for Agents -- Towards Dependable Agent Systems -- Tools and Standards -- From Testing to Theorem Proving -- Evaluation -- Benchmarking of Multiagent Systems -- Simulation -- Legal Consequences of Agent Deployment.

This handbook gives an overview on engineering of business information systems with agent technology. It introduces into this challenge, describes how to identify and to address the relevant technical problems, and explains how to engineer, integrated and test multiagent systems for real world applications. The book gives detailed descriptions of the development of two large scale multiagent systems: Agent.Hospital and Agent.Enterprise. These two systems have been developed in close cooperation with more than 20 enterprises and hospitals. They demonstrate clearly that multiagent technology has a great potential for innovative information systems, if a high degree of flexibility of the overall systems is required, e.g. because human actors and technical systems exhibit a great degree of local autonomy, or if the work environment is highly dynamic.