DALT 2004

Building multi-agent systems still calls for models and technologies that ensure system predictability, enable feature discovery and verification, and accommodate flexibility. Declarative approaches offer to satisfy precisely these properties of large-scale multi-agent systems. Recent advances in the area of computational logics provide a strong foundation for declarative languages and technologies. Equipped with such strong foundation, declarative approaches can enable agents to reason about their interactions and their environment and hence not only establish the required tasks but also handle exceptions that arise in many systems.

However, a great effort still has to be done to make formal methods and declarative technologies available to the broader agent community, and to apply theoretical results to enable practical implementation of agent systems.  Accordingly, Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT) workshop aims at bringing together (1) researchers working on formal methods for agent and multi-agent systems design, (2) engineers interested in exploiting the potentials of declarative approaches for specification of agent-based systems, and (3) practitioners exploring the technology issues arising from a declarative representation of systems.

• Declarative agent communication and coordination languages
• Declarative approaches to the engineering of agent systems
• Experimental studies of declarative technologies
• Industrial and commercial experiences with declarative agent technologies
• Formal methods for the specification and verification of agent systems
• Computational logics in multi-agent systems
• Argumentation and dialectical systems
• Declarative description of contracts and negotiation issues
• Lessons learned from the design and implementation of agent systems
• Declarative paradigms for the combination of heterogeneous agents
• Constraints and agent systems
• Declarative policies and security in MAS
• Knowledge-based and knowledge-intensive MAS
• Modeling of agent rationality