The ninth annual international workshop Engineering Societies in the Agents’ World ´ ´ was hosted by the Ecole Nationale Superieure ´ des Mines de Saint-Etienne (ENSM-SE), France, in September 2008. The workshop was organized as a stand-alone event, r- ning over three days. ESAW 2008 built upon the success of prior ESAW workshops: ESAW 2007 held in Athens, ESAW 2006 held in Dublin, and ESAW 2005 held in Kus ¸adasi, going back to ?rst edition of the workshop which was held in Berlin in 2000. ESAW 2007 was attended by 60 participants from 12 different countries. Each pres- tation was followed by highly interactive discussions, in line with the ESAW spirit of having open discussions with fellow experts. The ESAWworkshopseries startedin 2000to providea forumforpresentinghighly interdisciplinary work on technologies, methodologies, platforms and tools for the - gineeringof complexarti?cial agent societies. Such systems have found applicationsin many diverse domains such as complex system engineering, P2P, e-business and am- ent intelligence. Despite ESAW traditionally placing emphasis on practical engineering issuesandapplications,theworkshopdidnotexcludetheoreticalandphilosophicalc- tributions, provided that they clearly documented their connection to the core applied issues.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2008, held in Saint-Etienne, France, in September 2008.
The 13 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited long paper were carefully selected from 29 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on organisations and norm-governed systems, privacy and security, agent-oriented software engineering, emergence and self-organisation, as well as simulation.