Keith Decker's TAEMS framework modeled the quantitative relationships among tasks, uncertainty, deadlines, cost and quality so coordination mechanisms could be designed around the environment agents actually faced.
Edmund Durfee's work on partial global planning showed how distributed problem solvers could coordinate using incomplete, local and sometimes outdated views of one another's plans.
How Victor Lesser’s work on distributed AI, coordination and the organization of complex AI systems helped establish the intellectual foundations of multi-agent systems.
How Nick Jennings helped turn multi-agent systems into an engineering discipline with work on coordination, negotiation and real-world agent applications.