Formal Models of Agents

This volume contains a number of revised papers that were selected from - pers presented at the last ModelAge workshop held in Certosa di Pertignano (Italy) in 1997, organised by the Institute of Psychology of the Italian CNR (IP-CNR), Division of Arti cial Intelligence, Cognitive Modeling and Inter- tion. The organisation chair was held by Amedeo Cesta. The workshop, and indeed the ModelAge project as a whole, aimed to bring together a number of researchers stemming from di erent disciplines to discuss formal models of agency from di erent perspectives. These disciplines included arti cial intel- gence, software engineering, applied logic, databases, and organisation theory. The e ld of intelligent agents has become an important research area within these disciplines, and in the workshop as in the present volume the concept of agency is thus considered from a multi-disciplinaryperspective. In the introductory chapter of this volume more can be found on the area of intelligent agents as well as on the topic of formal models of these. We f- thermore provide some key references, so that the reader can better appreciate the position of the present volume within the literature on agent technology.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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.