The 8th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2010) will be held as part of the workshop programme of the 10th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010) at Toronto, Canada, in May 2010.

DALT 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.

Following the success of DALT 2003 in Melbourne, DALT 2004 in New York, DALT 2005 in Utrecht, DALT 2006 in Hakodate, DALT 2007 in Honolulu, DALT 2008 in Estoril, DALT 2009 in Budapest, 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.

The post-proceedings of DALT 2003 (LNAI 2990), DALT 2004 (LNAI 3476), DALT 2005 (LNAI 3904), DALT 2006 (LNAI 4327), DALT 2007 (LNAI 4897), DALT 2008 have been published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

• 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
  • game theory and mechanism design for multi-agent systems
  • semantics of agent communication
  • model checking agents and multi-agent systems
• 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 architectures
• Applications of declarative techniques to:
  • agents and the semantic web
  • multi-agent systems for service-oriented computing
  • agent-based grid computing
  • agent communication and coordination languages
  • protocol specification and conformance checking
  • declarative description of contracts and negotiation policies
  • security and trust in multiagent systems
• Evaluation of declarative approaches:
  • experimental analysis of declarative agent technologies
  • industrial experiences with declarative agent technologies