Guest Editors´ Introduction: Dependable Agent Systems

It is well known that building dependable software systems for dynamic environments is difficult. It is also well known that building large-scale distributed software systems is difficult. The relatively few attempts to combine these two tasks confirm that successfully building large-scale distributed systems with predictable dependability properties is exceptionally difficult. The articles in this special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems deal with this issue and discuss an emerging and exciting new approach to building these most challenging kinds of systems.