Includes bibliographical references and author index.

From "clean" mechanisms to "dirty" models : methodological perspectives of an up-scaling of actor constellations / Uwe Schimank -- Sociological foundation of the holonic approach using habitus-field-theory to improve multiagent systems / Frank Hillebrandt -- Linking micro and macro description of scalable social systems using reference nets / Michael Köhler [and others] -- Building scalable virtual communities : infrastructure requirements and computational costs / Omer F. Rana, Asif Akram, Steven J. Lynden -- Organization : the central concept for qualitative and quantitative scalability / Michael Schillo, Daniela Spresny -- Agents enacting social roles : balancing formal structure and practical rationality in MAS design / Martin Meister, Diemo Urbig, Kay Schröter, Renate Gerstl -- Scalability, scaling processes, and the management of complexity : a system theoretical approach / Kai Paetow, Marco Schmitt, Thomas Malsch -- On the organisation of agent experience : scaling up social cognition / Michael Rovatsos, Kai Paetow -- Trust and the economy of symbolic goods : a contribution to the scalabilityof multi-agent systems / Bettina Fley, Michael Florian -- Coordination in scaling actor constellations / Christian W.G. Lasarczyk, Thomas Kron -- From conditional commitments to generalized media : on means fo coordination between self-governed entities / Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer -- Scalability and the social dynamics of communication : on comparing social network analysis and communication-oriented modelling as models of communication networks / Steffen Albrecht [and others] -- Multiagent systems without agents : mirror-holons for the compilation and enactment of communication structures / Matthias Nickles, Gerhard Weiss -- Communication systems : a unified model of socially intelligent systems / Matthias Nickles, Michael Rovatsos, Wilfried Brauer, Gerhard Weiss.

Print version record.

This book includes contributions from an interdisciplinary field of research we call Socionics. Based on a close cooperation between sociologists and researchers from distributed artificial intelligence and multiagent systems, Socionics deals with the exploration of the emergence and dynamics of artificial social systems, agent societies, as well as hybrid man-machine societies. The aim is both to develop intelligent computer technologies by picking up theoretical concepts and methods from sociology and to improve sociological models of societies and organizations by using advanced computer technology. The 15 articles in this state-of-the-art survey combine selected contributions from sociology and informatics on the modeling, construction, and study of complex social systems with special regard to the problem of scaling multiagent systems. The discussion focuses on four specific research areas: multi-layer modeling, organization and self-organization, emergence of social structures, and paths from an agent-centered to a communication-centered perspective in modeling multiagent systems.