DALT 2009

The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT), in its seventh 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 2009 will be held as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2009, the 8th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, in May 2009 in Budapest, Hungary. DALT aims to make formal methods and declarative technologies and approaches available to and understood by a broader part of multi-agent researchers. Its second objective is to foster the application of theoretical results to the implementation of working systems. These issues are being addressed by DALT through providing a discussion forum to both (i) support the transfer of declarative paradigms and techniques to the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners, and (ii) bring the issue of designing and verifying complex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative languages and technologies.

DALT will be of particular interest to multi-agent system researchers who are working in computational logic and formal methods in general. It will also be of great interest to researchers and practitioners applying these methods to particular applications such as service-oriented computing, grid computing and e-applications. It will be of general interest to researchers interested in linking agent theory to concrete applications.

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