DALT 2008

The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT), in its sixth edition this year, is a well-established forum for researchers interested in sharing their experiences in combining declarative and formal approaches with engineering and technology aspects of agents and multiagent systems. Building complex agent systems calls for models and technologies that ensure predictability, allow for the verification of properties, and guarantee flexibility. Developing technologies that can satisfy these requirements still poses an important and difficult challenge. Here, declarative approaches have the potential of offering solutions satisfying the needs for both specifying and developing multiagent systems. Moreover, they are gaining more and more attention in important application areas such as the semantic web, service-oriented computing, security, and electronic contracting. For instance, some convergence points between the areas of formal methods for dealing with web services and formal methods for agents are emerging and gaining more and more attention.

DALT 2008 will be held as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2008, the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, in May 2008 in Estoril, Portugal. Following the success of five previous editions, DALT will again aim at providing a discussion forum to both  support the transfer of declarative paradigms and techniques to the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners, and (ii) to bring the issue of designing complex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative languages and technologies.

DALT topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

General themes:

• specification of agents and multiagent systems
• declarative approaches to engineering agent systems

Formal techniques:

• (constraint) logic programming approaches to agent systems
• distributed constraint satisfaction
• modal and epistemic logics for agent modelling
• model checking agents and multiagent systems

Declarative models:

• declarative models of agent beliefs, goals and capabilities
• declarative models of bounded rationality
• declarative paradigms for the combination of heterogeneous
   agents
• electronic institutions
• agent-inspired declarative approaches to web services or
   service-oriented architectures

Applications of declarative techniques to:

• agents and the semantic web
• service-oriented multiagent systems
• agent communication and coordination languages
• protocol specification and conformance checking
• description of contracts and negotiation policies
• security in multiagent systems

Evaluation of declarative approaches:

• experimental analysis of declarative agent technologies
• industrial  experiences with declarative agent technologies