With the growing amount of distributed and heterogeneous information and services, conventional information systems have come to their limits. This gave rise to the development of a Multi-Agent System (the “Logical Client”) which can be used in complex information systems as well as in other advanced software systems. Computer agents are proactive, reactive and social. They form a community of independent software components that can communicate and co-operate in order to accomplish complex tasks. Thus the agent-oriented paradigm provides a new and powerful approach to programming distributed systems. The communication framework developed is based on standards like CORBA, KQML and KIF. It provides an embedded rule based system to find adequate reactions to incoming messages. The macro-architecture of the Logical Client consists of independent agents and uses artificial intelligence to cope with complex patterns of communication and actions. A set of system agents is also provided, including the Strategy Service as a core component for modelling processes at runtime, the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Component for supporting remote co-operation between human users and the Repository for managing and hiding the file based data flow in heterogeneous networks. This architecture seems to be capable of managing complexity in information systems. It is also being implemented in a complex simulation system that monitors and simulates the environmental radioactivity in the country Baden-Wu¨rttemberg. ©1999 American Institute of Physics.