Formal Models of Agents

This volume provides a selection of strictly refereed papers first presented during a workshop held within the context of the ESPRIT ModelAge Project in Certosa di Pertignano, Italy, in 1997.The 15 revised full papers presented together with an introductory survey by the volume editors were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. The book is devoted to the interdisciplinary study of formal models of agency and intelligent agents from the points of view of artificial intelligence, software engineering, applied logic, databases, and organization theory. Among the topics addressed are various types of agents and multi-agent systems, cooperation, communication, specification, verification, deontic logic, diagnosis, and decision making.

Inhalt

Formal Models of Agents: An Introduction.- A Model of BDI-Agent in Game-Theoretic Framework.- Dynamic Belief Hierarchies.- Modelling Internal Dynamic Behaviour of BDI Agents.- Towards an Agent-Oriented Framework for Specification of Information Systems.- The Impossibility of Modelling Cooperation in PD-Game.- Designing Multi-agent Systems around an Extensible Communication Abstraction.- Social Interactions of Autonomous Agents: Private and Global Views on Communication.- Towards a Proof-Theoretic Foundation for Actor Specification and Verification.- Nondeterministic Actions with Typical Effects: Reasoning about Scenarios.- Agents' Dynamic Mental Attitudes.- Diagnostic Agents for Distributed Systems.- Preferential Action Semantics (Preliminary Report).- Dialectical proof theory for defeasible argumentation with defeasible priorities (preliminary report).- The Role of Diagnosis and Decision Theory in Normative Reasoning.- Contextual Deontic Logic.