Rapid advances in technologies such as networking, parallel computing and information management have led to the development of intelligent software components that act autonomously on the behalf of users, can analyse and access a diverse range of information, can react to changes in their environment, and can cooperate and coordinate their activities to complete a task or goal. Such components may be distributed across a network, and may work seamlessly to perform this goal, and do so without the direct intervention of a user. Such technology involves the integration of ideas from many different disciplines, such as artificial intelligence, parallel processing, knowledge sharing, object-oriented design, information retrieval, distributed workflows, and databases. The objectives of developing such systems are to provide an emergent functionality that allows a robust, flexible, and scalable approach to solving problems and providing services in various application domains.