Book excerpt: Distributed Artificial Intelligence presents a collection of papers describing the state of research in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). DAI is concerned with the cooperative solution of problems by a decentralized group of agents. The agents may range from simple processing elements to complex entities exhibiting rational behavior. The book is organized into three parts. Part I addresses ways to develop control abstractions that efficiently guide problem-solving; communication abstractions that yield cooperation; and description abstractions that result in effective organizational structure. Part II describes architectures for developing and testing DAI systems. Part III discusses applications of DAI in manufacturing, office automation, and man-machine interactions. This book is intended for researchers, system developers, and students in artificial intelligence and related disciplines. It can also be used as a reference for students and researchers in other disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy, robotics, and distributed computing, who wish to understand the issues of DAI.