DALT 2012

The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT), in its tenth 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.

DALT 2012 will be held as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2012, the 11th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, in June 2011 in Valencia, Spain. Following the success of nine 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 2012 will have as a special interest topics those future trends of the web, where declarative languages and technologies for multiagents systems will play an effective role: in particular, social computing (models of social interactions, trust, commitments, and contracts; social environments based on declarative technologies) and its related semantic issues (explicit representation of knowledge and mechanisms for allowing societies of agents to reason on that).

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

DALT 2012 special topic: declarative approaches for agent-based social computing:

• models of social interactions among agents
• models of buiness interactions among agents
• models of trust, commitments, and reputation for agents
• declarative description of contracts and negotiation policies
• social environments based on declarative technologies
• Semantic Web-aware declarative agents

General themes:

• specification of agents and multi-agent systems
• declarative approaches to engineering agent-based systems

Formal techniques:

• (constraint) logic programming approaches to agent systems
• distributed constraint satisfaction
• modal and epistemic logics for agent modeling
• game theory and mechanism design for multi-agent systems
• semantics of agent communication
• model checking agents and multi-agent systems
• agent communication and coordination languages
• protocol specification, verification, and reasoning

Declarative models:

• declarative models of agent beliefs, goals and capabilities
• declarative models of bounded rationality
• declarative approaches for agent-based grid computing
• declarative paradigms for the combination of heterogeneous agents
• declarative approaches to organizations and electronic institutions
• agent-inspired declarative approaches to Web services and service-oriented computing

Applications of declarative techniques to:

• multi-agent systems for service-oriented computing
• agent-based grid computing
• security and trust in multi-agent systems
• e-health, e-commerce, e-learning, sociotechnical systems, social networks, virtual organizations.

Evaluation of declarative approaches:

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