Adaptation for purposes of self-healing self-protection self-management or self-regulation
is currently considered to be one of the most challenging pr- erties of distributed systems
that operate in dynamic unpredictable and - tentially hostile environments. Engineering for
adaptation is particularly c- plicated when the distributed system itself is composed of
autonomous entities that on one hand may act collaboratively and with benevolence and on
the other maybehavesel?shlywhilepursuingtheirowninterests.Still theseentities have to
coordinate themselves in order to adapt appropriately to the prevailing environmental
conditions and furthermore to deliberate upon their own and the system's con?guration and to
be transparent to their users yet consistent with any human requirements. The question
therefore of how to organize the
envisagedadaptationforsuchautonomousentitiesinasystematicwaybecomes of paramount importance.
The ?rst international workshop on Organized Adaptation in Multi-Agent Systems (OAMAS) was a
one-day event held as part of the workshop p- gram arranged by the international conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). It was hosted in Estoril during May 2008
and was attended by more than 30 researchers. OAMAS was the steady convergence of a number of
lines of research which suggested that such a workshop would be timely and opportune. This
includes the areas of autonomic computing swarm intelligence agent societies self-organizing
complex systems and 'emergence' in general.
