Call for Papers (to be updated for 2010)

This Call for Papers is also available in text format.

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:

• specification of agents and multiagent systems
• declarative approaches to engineering agent systems

• (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 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

• 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

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

For details on important dates and the submission procedure, please follow the appropriate links on the menu on the left.

Printed copies of the proceedings will be available at the workshop. The post-proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

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 (LNAI 5397) have been published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.