Multi-Agent Systems are communities of problem-solving entities that can exhibit varying degrees of intelligence. They can perceive and react to their environment, they can have individual or joint goals, for which they can plan and execute actions. Work on such systems integrates many technologies and concepts in artificial intelligence and other areas of computing as well as other disciplines. The agent paradigm has become very popular and widely used in recent years, due to its applicability to a large range of domains, from search engines to educational aids, to electronic commerce and trade, e-procurement, recommendation systems, and ambient intelligence, to cite only some. Computational logic provides a well-defined, general, and rigorous framework for studying syntax, semantics and procedures for various capabilities and functionalities of individual agents, as well as interaction amongst agents in multi-agent systems. It also provides a well-defined and rigorous framework for implementations, envir- ments, tools, and standards, and for linking together specification and verification of properties of individual agents and multi-agent systems.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and revised proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Computational Logic for Multi-Agent Systems, CLIMA IX, held in Dresden, Germany, in September 2008 and co-located with the 11th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence, JELIA 2008.
The 8 full papers, presented together with two invited papers, were carefull selected from 18 submissions and passed through two rounds of reviewing and revision. Topics addressed in the regular papers include the use of automata-based techniques for verifying agents' conformance with protocols, and an approach based on the C+ action description language to provide formal specifications of social processes such as those used in business processes and social networks. Other topics include casting reasoning as planning and thus providing an analysis of reasoning with resource bounds, a discussion of the formal properties of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) extended with knowledge operators, and the use of argumentation in multi-agent negotiation. The invited contributions discuss complexity results for model-checking temporal and strategic properties of multi-agent systems, and the challenges in design and development of programming languages for multi-agent systems.
