Multi-Agent Systems: A Contemporary Treatment

A textbook that teaches the concepts and techniques of Multi-Agent Systems in the era of LLMs.
Authors

Dell Zhang (XSci Ltd)

Jun Wang (University College London)

Benjamin Chang (University of Cambridge)

Working draft of

27 September 2026

About This Book

Book cover of Multi-Agent Systems: A Contemporary Treatment by Dell Zhang, Jun Wang, and Benjamin Chang. Beneath the title, the outline of a human brain is drawn as a network of interconnected nodes, with small robot, drone, and chart icons at the junctions; the words Working Draft and the book's web address stand at the foot.

Who it is for. Engineers building agent systems who suspect those systems are re-enacting a theory nobody showed them; students of multi-agent systems who want the classical results run on machines that finally exist; and anyone who must decide whether to build several agents at all.

What it teaches. Three things above all: how to price the decision to use more than one agent, and when a single agent or a fixed workflow wins; which classical results — on communication, cooperation, coordination, strategic interaction, collective choice, and institutions — transfer to language-model agents, and on what assumptions; and how to build, evaluate, secure, and account for a team of agents, from a runtime written from scratch to a framework you can leave.

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NoteCite this book 
@book{zhang2026masact,
  title = {Multi-Agent Systems: A Contemporary Treatment},
  author = {Zhang, Dell and Wang, Jun and Chang, Benjamin},
  year = 2026,
  note = {Manuscript in progress, written in public},
  url = {https://books.bloo-mind.ai/masact/}
}