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.
