The rapid increase in the need to process massive amounts of decentralized data has resulted in new technologies, like mobile agents, to satisfy requirements in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Nowadays, along with execution requirements, more adaptive and secure systems are needed. Scalability, security, and quality of service are fundamental factors that affect every user’s system preference. On the other hand, for the sake of cost effectiveness, researchers focus on reducing the network bandwidth and allowing users and applications to be accessible from anywhere. To overcome network bandwidth constraints, an agent can be deployed to cope with the query or transaction. Sending a mobile agent from the client to the server prevents unnecessary immediate results and information passing through the network.

The book describes the use of agents to address some of the aforementioned fundamental issues. Part 1 deals with the issues related to the effects of scaling on agent coordination. The coordination issue of large-scale multiagent systems is presented in a clustered fashion in four categories. The issue of coordination is a fundamental problem among the entities, in terms of quality of service and completeness.

Part 2 summarizes the research on the scaling issues of existing coordination approaches, and demonstrates the effectiveness of the coordinated commitment in capturing realistic task dependencies and ambiguities for the sake of quality of service. Moreover, presenting an efficient optimization via a negotiation process for establishing commitments, through the use of service-oriented computing, verifies and validates the agents’ control and behavior toward the overall objective of utility and efficiency.

Part 3 discusses the research on the new approaches for large-scale coordination. The idea of agents cooperating to solve a common problem may affect the scalability of the system, due to the resource competition.

Part 4 introduces the idea of monitoring, and addresses robustness and flexibility for large-scale coordination of agent-based systems and handling coordination failures in large-scale multiagent systems. More advanced issues, such as the autonomous and independent nature of agents and the exponential growth increase and decrease in coordination, forced the authors to expand the scope of the study to consider a restricted or limited number of agents for monitoring and failure detection. To justify some of the various challenges, particular emphasis is placed on size-based disagreement detection, which can be controlled through the use of subteams, and which can be used to achieve efficient coordination to build large teams.

In conclusion, the book contains very well-written articles on autonomous agent-related issues. It is a good source for someone who is beginning to develop an interest in this area, as well as for someone who has done some work in this area. The theoretical foundation can be found in the first and second parts, while the last two parts are more concerned with applications.