This paper proposes coordination patterns that support matchmaking, communication and interaction among mobile agents in addition to stationary ones. Mobile agent technology is a powerful implementation technique of distributed systems, but we need to manage migrations of agents, including their current and destination locations. The proposed patterns enable us to define coordination between mobile agents or between mobile and stationary agents without explicitly knowing their migrations between locations. They are mostly based on the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language, one of the most extended Agent Communication Languages, but also new patterns are proposed. Additionally, a case of study about tourism is presented.

Virtual Organizations are a specific type of Multi-Agent Systems that look for modeling agent organizations by means of elements typically used in Organizational Theory, such as roles, organizational goals, or services. The Organizational Theory considers that the structure of a human organization is likely to change through time, being the external and internal forces that drive organizational change the most important source for change. This work presents a set of guidelines that will help MAS designers and developers how to deal with these forces, in order to take advantage of them, or to avoid damage to the organization.

This work presents an extension of the Environment Dimension of the Virtual Organization Model, which is an Organization Modeling Language to define Organization-Centered Multi-Agent Systems. This extension allows this model to regulate the environment by supporting artifacts for organizational mechanisms, an approach based on the Agents & Artifacts conceptual framework. The three main entities of this framework are agents, artifacts and workspaces, which have been integrated in this work inside the Virtual Organization Model. Additionally, this paper presents an application to the health care setting and an analysis of the related work on this topic.

Organizational mechanisms can be introduced in a multi-agent system with the aim of influencing the behavior of agents to achieve their objectives in a proper way. Thus, they are designed to achieve a better coordination between agents. In this paper, we propose to model organizational mechanisms by means of artifacts, which were presented within the Agents & Artifacts approach, and that present good advantages for coordinating agents environments. We claim that artifacts, as reactive entities located into the environment of a Multi-agent System, can help agents to reach their goals, seem to be a suitable abstraction for modeling organizational mechanisms. We also give some examples of possible uses.