The seventh international workshop ESAW 2006 ¿ Engineering Societies in the Agents World VII¿was hosted in the School of Computer Science and Inf- matics, University College Dublin, Ireland in September 2006. This workshop was organized as a stand-alone event, running over three days, and continued andenhancedthe high-qualityconferencetheme thatnowuniquelycharacterizes the ESAW workshop series. ESAW VII built upon the success of prior ESAW workshops ¿ Kü sadasi (2005), London (2004) and Toulouse (2004), going back to the inauguralworkshopheld in Berlin(2000). This workshopwasattended by 50 participants from 13 di?erent countries. Over 25 researchers presented their work and substantial time was allocated each day for ad-hoc interactive disc- sions on those presented topics. Indeed, these opportunities for the exchange of views and open discussion with fellow experts are one of the hallmarks of the ESAW series. Discussions coalesced around ESAW¿s main themes: ¿ Engineering multi-agent systems ¿ Methodologies for analysis, design, development and veri?cation of agent societies ¿ Interaction and coordination in agent societies ¿ Autonomic agent societies ¿ Trust in agent societies For moreinformationabouttheworkshop,theinterestedreaderisreferredto 1 the ESAW 2006 WWW site . The original contributions have been published as a Technical Report (UCD-CSI-2006-5) and this may be obtained freely from the Technical Report section on the WWW page of the School of Computer Science 2 and Informatics at University College Dublin . These post-proceedings continue the series published by Springer (ESAW 2000: LNAI 1972; ESAW 2001: LNAI 2203; ESAW 2002: LNAI 2577; ESAW 2003: LNAI 3071; ESAW 2004: LNAI 3451; ESAW 2005: LNAI 3963).

Engineering of Multi-agent Systems.- "It's Not Just Goals All the Way Down" - "It's Activities All the Way Down".- The Construction of Multi-agent Systems as an Engineering Discipline.- Current Issues in Multi-Agent Systems Development.- Architecture-Centric Software Development of Situated Multiagent Systems.- Organization Oriented Programming: From Closed to Open Organizations.- Analysis, Design, Development and Verification of Agent Societies.- Modelling and Executing Complex and Dynamic Business Processes by Reification of Agent Interactions.- Model Driven Development of Multi-Agent Systems with Repositories of Social Patterns.- A Norm-Governed Systems Perspective of Ad Hoc Networks.- Interaction and Coordination in Agent Societies.- A Definition of Exceptions in Agent-Oriented Computing.- Toward an Ontology of Regulation: Socially-Based Support for Coordination in Human and Machine Joint Activity.- An Algorithm for Conflict Resolution in Regulated Compound Activities.- Modeling the Interaction Between Semantic Agents and Semantic Web Services Using MDA Approach.- Formal Modelling of a Coordination System: From Practice to Theory, and Back Again.- Autonomic Agent Societies.- Using Constraints and Process Algebra for Specification of First-Class Agent Interaction Protocols.- Dynamic Specifications in Norm-Governed Open Computational Societies.- Enhancing Self-organising Emergent Systems Design with Simulation.- Adaptation of Autonomic Electronic Institutions Through Norms and Institutional Agents.- Managing Resources in Constrained Environments with Autonomous Agents.- Trust in Agent Societies.- Towards a Computational Model of Creative Societies Using Curious Design Agents.- Privacy Management in User-Centred Multi-agent Systems.- Effective Use ofOrganisational Abstractions for Confidence Models.- Competence Checking for the Global E-Service Society Using Games.