25 Years of Declarative Agent Technologies in Italy

   page       BibTeX_logo.png       attach   
Davide Ancona, Daniela Briola, Angelo Ferrando, Maurizio Martelli, Viviana Mascardi
Viviana Mascardi, Andrea Omicini (eds.)
The Agents Journey: Twenty-Five Years of Multi-agent Systems, chapter 11, pages 287–319
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (State-of-the-Art Survey) 16395
Springer Nature Switzerland
April 2026

Since the first appearance of agents and multiagent systems (MAS), their close connection with declarative technologies was clearly devised and drove – and still drives – a large share of the research in the field. Declarative technologies play many roles in the MAS context: they can be exploited in the specification of the agents and MAS architecture, in the specification of their conversational flow, in their implementation, and in the representation of the agents’ knowledge. In all of these roles, one main advantage of declarative technologies is the support to transparency and explainability thanks to a (more, w.r.t. other paradigms) readable, understandable, and interoperable description of the system, and to reliability, by means of formal verification of its properties. This chapter, guided by works presented at Workshop on Objects and Agents (WOA) starting from 2000, discusses the crucial role that declarative technologies play in a MAS context.

journal or series
book Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
container publication
page_white_acrobatThe Agents Journey (edited volume, 2026) — Viviana Mascardi, Andrea Omicini
companion publication
page_white_acrobatAI Infrastructure: From Gigastructure to Edge Intelligence with Multi-Agent Systems (book chapter, 2026) — Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, Viviana Mascardi
page_white_acrobatIntelligent Agents from Symbolic to Neurosymbolic Systems: The Quest for Integration (book chapter, 2026) — Andrea Agiollo, Roberta Calegari, Giovanni Ciatto, Matteo Magnini, Andrea Omicini, Federico Sabbatini
page_white_acrobatPreface (editorial/introduction/preface, 2026) — Viviana Mascardi, Andrea Omicini
funding project
wrenchENGINES — ENGineering INtElligent Systems around intelligent agent technologies (28/09/2023–27/02/2026)
works as
companion publication for
page_white_acrobatAI Infrastructure: From Gigastructure to Edge Intelligence with Multi-Agent Systems (book chapter, 2026) — Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, Viviana Mascardi
page_white_acrobatIntelligent Agents from Symbolic to Neurosymbolic Systems: The Quest for Integration (book chapter, 2026) — Andrea Agiollo, Roberta Calegari, Giovanni Ciatto, Matteo Magnini, Andrea Omicini, Federico Sabbatini
page_white_acrobatPreface (editorial/introduction/preface, 2026) — Viviana Mascardi, Andrea Omicini