this book is devoted to the design and analysis of techniques enabling intelligent and dynamic cooperation and communication among agents in a distributed environment. a flexible theoretical formalism is developed in detail and it is demonstrated how this approach can be used for the design of agent architectures in practice. the formal part of this work is based on a variant of the bdi logic introduced by georgeff and rao. this book, for the first time, outlines this formalism in some depth. the most important practical benefit provided is the concept of cooperation protocols allowing the representation of various methods of cooperation and possible patterns of dialogue.