This volume in the lecture series on artificial intelligence is about concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate and cooperate to perform their computing tasks. The communication between them is called interaction, and is the core of such multiagent systems.

The volume is made up of 18 individual chapters, organized into three parts, and written by different authors, with only modest common frameworks and terminology. The first part presents some background about communication, with contributions about the theory of speech acts, on agent communication languages such as FIPA, and about the contract net protocol.

Part 2 is about current work on agent communication. Topics addressed include: the design, verification, and compliance testing of various multiagent interaction communication protocols; the semantics in communication process algebra; information combination in multiagent resource management; coordination procedures; argumentation-based communication between agents; communication for goal directed agents; dialogue game protocols; and computational models for believable conversational agents.

The third part is reduced to one chapter, on the future of agent communication, discussing aspects such as autonomy, heterogeneity, dynamism, and consistency.

Because of its focus on agents and intelligent systems, the volume misses out on introductory material for newcomers and students, and on any coverage of strongly related work in Web services and intelligent networks rooted in communication signaling protocols. No application case is described fully, and no performance analysis is reported.

This volume is mostly relevant to researchers interested in the theory of agents.