Paolo Torroni - Böcker

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18thInternational Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems,PRIMA 2015, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in October 2015. The 29 full papers and 24 short papers presented in thisvolume were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2016, held in Phuket, Thailand, in August 22-26, 2016.The 16 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers, 9 short papers and three extended abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. The intention of the papers is to showcase research in several domains, ranging from foundations of agent theory and engineering aspects of agent systems, to emerging interdisciplinary areas of agent-based research.

Agent metaphors and technologies are increasingly adopted to harness and g- ernthecomplexityoftoday'ssystems.Asaconsequence,thegrowingcomplexity of agent systems calls for models and technologies that promote system p- dictability and enable feature discovery and veri?cation. Formal methods and declarative technologies have recently attracted a growing interest as a means to address such issues. The aim of the DALT 2003 workshop was two-fold. On the one hand, we wanted to foster a discussion forum to export such techniques into the broader communityofagentresearchersandpractitioners.Ontheotherhand,wewanted to bring in the issues of real-world, complex, and possibly large-scale agent s- tem design in the perspective of formal methods and declarative technologies.Thanks to the very high quality of our program committee, we managed to put together a rich program, including three technical sessions and two panel sessions:TheUseofDeclarativeProgrammingforAgent-OrientedSoftwareEn- neering, moderated by Leon Sterling and Andrea Omicini, and Declarative and Logic-Based Technology for Agent Reasoning and Interactions, organized and moderated by Rafael Bordini and Wiebe van der Hoek, with the participation of ?ve invited panelists. This bookcontainstherevisedandextendedversionsofthe paperspresented at the workshop, as well as three invited contributions by leading researchers of the ?eld. It is composed of three parts: (i) software engineering and multi-agent system prototyping, (ii) agent reasoning, BDI logics and extensions, and (iii) social aspects of multi-agent systems.

The second edition of the workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Te- nologies (DALT 2004) was held July 2004 in New York City, and was a great success. We saw a signi?cant increase in both the number of submitted papers and workshop attendees from the ?rst meeting, held July 2003 in Melbourne. Nearly 40 research groups worldwide were motivated to contribute to this event by submitting their most recent research achievements, covering a wide variety of the topics listed in the call for papers. More than 30 top researchers agreed to join the Program Committee, which then collectively faced the hard task of selecting the one-day event program. The fact that research in multi-agent systems is no longer only a novel and promising research horizon at dawn is, in our opinion, the main reason behind DALT’s (still short) success story. On the one hand, agent theories and app- cations are mature enough to model complex domains and scenarios, and to successfully address a wide range of multifaceted problems, thus creating the urge to make the best use of this expressive and versatile paradigm, and also pro?t from all the important results achieved so far. On the other hand, bui- ing multi-agent systems still calls for models and technologies that could ensure system predictability, accommodate ?exibility, heterogeneity and openness, and enable system veri?cation.

The notion of agency has recently increased its in?uence in the research and - velopment of computational logic based systems, while at the same time sign- cantly gaining from decades of research in computational logic. Computational logic provides a well-de?ned, general, and rigorous framework for studying s- tax, semantics and procedures, for implementations, environments, tools, and standards, facilitating the ever important link between speci?cation and ver- cation of computational systems. The purpose of the Computational Logic in Multi-agent Systems (CLIMA) international workshop series is to discuss techniques, based on computational logic, for representing, programming, and reasoning about multi-agent systems in a formal way. Former CLIMA editions were conducted in conjunction with other major computational logic and AI events such as CL in July 2000, ICLP in December 2001, FLoC in August 2002, and LPNMR and AI-Math in January 2004. The ?fth edition of CLIMA was held Lisbon, Portugal, in September 29–30, 2004.We,asorganizers,andinagreementwiththeCLIMASteeringCommittee, opted for co-location with the 9th European Conference on Logics in Arti?cial Intelligence (JELIA 2004), wishing to promote the CLIMA research topics in the broader community of logics in AI, a community whose growing interest in multi-agent issues has been demonstrated by the large number of agent-related papers submitted to recent editions of JELIA. The workshop received 35 submissions – a sensible increase from the previous edition.Thesubmittedpapersshowedthatthelogicalfoundationsofmulti-agent systems are felt by a large community to be a very important research topic, upon which classical AI and agent-related issues are to be addressed.

The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies is a we- established venue for researchers interested in sharing their experiences in the areas of declarative and formal aspects of agents and multi-agent systems, and in engineering and technology. Today it is still a challenge to develop techno- gies that can satisfy the requirements of complex agent systems. The design and development of multi-agent systems still calls for models and technologies that ensure predictability, enable feature discovery, allow for the veri?cation of properties, and guarantee ?exibility. Declarative approaches are potentially a valuable means for satisfying the needs of multi-agent system developers and for specifying multi-agent systems. DALT 2005, the third edition of the workshop, was held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2005, in conjunction with AAMAS 2005, the Fourth Int- national Joint Conference on Agents and Multiagent Systems. Over 30 persons attended the workshop con?rming the success of the previous editions in M- bourne 2003 (LNAI 2990) and New York 2004 (LNAI 3476). The workshop series is a forum of discussion aimed both at supporting the transfer of decla- tive paradigms and techniques into the broader community of agent researchers andpractitioners, and atbringing theissuesofdesigningreal-world andcomplex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative progr- ming and technologies.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational Logic for Multi-Agent Systems, CLIMA VI. The book presents 14 revised full technical papers, 4 contest papers, and 7 invited papers together with 1 invited article are organized in topical sections on foundational aspects of agency, agent programming, agent interaction and normative systems, the first CLIMA contest, and on the project report of the SOCS project.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the First International Workshop on Languages, Methodologies and Development Tools for Multi-Agent Systems, LADS 2007, held in Durham, UK, in September 2007. The workshop was part of MALLOW 2007, a federation of workshops on Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organizations. The 15 revised full papers, presented together with 1 invited paper reporting the aims and achievements of the OpenKnowledge project, were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent reasoning and semantics, declarative languages and technologies, methodologies and design, and development frameworks.

This book contains the proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Languages, Methodologies and Development Tools for Multi-agent Systems (LADS 2009), which took place during September 7–9, 2009 in Turin, Italy. As in its 2007 edition, this workshop was a part of MALLOW, a federation of workshops on Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organizations. The LADS 2009 workshop addressed both theoretical and practical issues related to developing and deploying multi-agent systems. It constituted a rich forum where leading researchers from both academia and industry could share their experiencesonformalapproaches,programminglanguages,methodologies, tools andtechniques supporting the developmentanddeploymentof multi-agent systems.Fromatheoreticalpointofview,LADS2009aimedataddressingissues related to theories, methodologies, models and approaches that are needed to facilitate the development of multi-agent systems ensuring their predictability andveri?cation.Formaldeclarativemodelsandapproacheshavethe potentialof o?ering solutions for the speci?cation and design of multi-agent systems. From a practical point of view, LADS 2009 aimed at stimulating research and d- cussion on how multi-agent system speci?cations and designs can be e?ectively implemented and tested. This book is the result of a strict selection and review process. From 14 papers originally submitted to LADS 2009, and after 2 rounds of reviews, we selected 10 high-quality papers covering important topics related to multi-agent programming technology, such as: agent architectures, programming languages andmethodologies,socialinteractionmodels,developmenttoolsandapplications of multi-agent systems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, CLIMA XII, held in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2011. The 22 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The purpose of the CLIMA workshops is to provide a forum for discussing techniques, based on computational logic, for representing, programming and reasoning about agents and multi-agent systems in a formal way. This volume features five thematic special sessions: secrets and trust, knowledge and beliefs, logics for games and social choice, cooperation, logic and languages, and norms and normative multi-agent systems.