The advanced technology of multi-agent systems (MAS) provides a well-researched way of implementing complex distributed, scalable, and open ICT systems.
A multi-agent system is a system of multiple interacting software agents. A software agent is a self-contained software program that acts as a representative of something or someone (e.g., a device or a user). A software agent is goal-oriented: it carries out a task, and embodies knowledge for this purpose. For this task, it uses information from and performs actions in its local environment or context. Further, it is able to communicate with other entities (agents, systems, humans) for its tasks.

In multi-agent systems, a large number of actors are able to interact. Local agents focus on the interests of local sub-systems and influence the whole system via negotiations with other software agents. While the complexity of individual agents remains low, the intelligence level of the global system is high. In this way, multi-agent systems implement distributed decision-making systems in an open, flexible, and extensible way. Communication between actors can be minimized to a generic and uniform information exchange.

The interactions of individual agents in multi-agent systems can be made more efficient by using electronic markets, which provide a framework for distributed decision making based on microeconomics. Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies how economic agents (i.e. individuals, households, and firms) make decisions to allocate limited resources, typically in markets where goods or services are being bought and sold. One of the goals of microeconomics is to analyze market mechanisms that establish relative prices amongst goods and services and allocation of limited resources amongst many alternative uses.

Whereas, economists use microeconomic theory to model phenomena observed in the real world, computer scientists use the same theory to let distributed software systems behave in a desired way. Market-based computing is becoming a central paradigm in the design of distributed systems that need to act in complex environments. Market mechanisms provide a way to incentivize parties (in this case software agents), that are not under direct control of a central authority, to behave in a certain way. A microeconomic theory commonly used in MAS is that of general equilibrium. In general equilibrium markets, or exchange markets, all agents respond to the same price, that is determined by searching for the price that balances all demand and supply in the system. From a computational point of view, electronic equilibrium markets are distributed search algorithms aimed at finding the best
trade-offs in a multidimensional search space defined by the preferences of all agents participating in the market. The market outcome is Pareto optimal, a social optimal outcome for which no other outcome exists that makes one agent better-off without making other agents worse-off.