Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT)

AAMAS'04 Workshop - New York, July 19, 2004

Call for papers

Agent metaphors and technologies are more and more adopted to harness and govern the complexity of today's systems. However, it is still a challenge to develop technologies that can satisfy the requirements of complex systems. Importantly, building multi-agent systems still calls for models and technologies that ensure system predictability, enable feature discovery and verification, and accommodate flexibility.

Declarative approaches offer to satisfy precisely these properties of large-scale multi-agent systems. Recent advances in the area of computational logics provide a strong foundation for declarative languages and technologies. Equipped with such strong foundation, declarative approaches can enable agents to reason about their interactions and their environment and hence not only establish the required tasks but also handle exceptions that arise in many systems.

There is a growing interest in declarative technologies, both from researchers and practitioners. From a theoretical standpoint, the success o the five workshops on Computational Logic and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS-LP and CLIMA) over the years, and the previous edition of the DALT workshop are two good examples that show agent community is working on and using declarative approaches. From a practical standpoint, declarative technologies are being applied to specifications of business rules to business transactions. Importantly, recent work on standardizing business languages as well as communication protocols for Web services are relying on declarative technologies.

However, a great effort still has to be done to make formal methods and declarative technologies available to and understood by the broader agent community, and to apply theoretical results to enable practical implementation of agent systems.

Accordingly, Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT) workshop aims at bringing together (1) researchers working on formal methods for agent and multi-agent systems design, (2) engineers interested in exploiting the potentials of declarat e approaches for specification of agent-based systems, and (3) practitioners exploring the technology issues arising from a declarative representation of systems.

The main goal of DALT is then to foster a discussion forum to export declarative paradigms and techniques into the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners, as well as bring in the issues of real-world, complex and possibly large-scale agent system design in the perspective of declarative programming and technologies.

Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to:

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