The open agent society and its enemies: a position statement and research programme Jeremy Pitt * , Abe Mamdani, Patricia Charlton 1 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Intelligent and Interactive Systems, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London SW7 2BT, UK Abstract Virtual enterprises and connected communities are common visions of future commercial and social structures. Underpinning these visions is the idea of the open agent society: a ¯exible network of heterogeneous software processes, each individually aware of the oppor- tunities available to them, capable of autonomous decision making to take advantage of them, and co-operating to meet transient needs and conditions. Furthermore, the society should be regulated by the kind of relations (contractual and normative) found in human business and social interactions. This paper reviews experience with developing, deploying and evaluating multi-agent systems, and distills from this some of the drivers for the open agent society. We then identify three crucial innovations which will help realise this idea. However, the devel- opment of the open agent society is exposed to certain risks, and we consider a number of `enemies' which threaten its development. We conclude that an awareness of the risks entails new paradigms for engineering multi-agent systems, in which dynamic social relationships are as important as interface de®nitions in providing the interoperability required for the open agent society. Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Multi-agent systems; Human-computer interaction; Information society; Networked intelligence 1. Introduction Virtual enterprises and connected communities are common visions of future commercial and social structures. Virtual enterprises (O'Leary et al., 1997; Berry and www.elsevier.com/locate/tele Telematics and Informatics 18 (2001) 67±87 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-20-7594-6318; fax: +44-20-7594-6274. E-mail address: j.pitt@ic.ac.uk (J. Pitt). 1 Present address: Centre de Recherche de Motorola-Paris, Espace Technologique, Commune de Saint Aubin, 91193 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France. 0736-5853/01/$ - see front matter Ó 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0736-5853(00)00019-8