Executive Summary Dagstuhl Seminar 06261: Foundations and Practice of Programming Multi-Agent Systems

The “Foundations and Practice of Programming Multi-Agent Systems” Dagstuhl Seminar aimed at bringing together researchers interested in programming languages for multi-agent systems, agent-oriented software engineering, and various related aspects such as verification, and formal semantics. We were delighted with the result of this seminar, which gave participants a clear view of the most advanced techniques being currently investigated in research on those topics throughout the world, and also a clear understanding of all the most important open problems that need to be addressed by this research community. The seminar was particularly successful in elucidating the relationship between work being done by the “programming languages for multi-agent systems” (ProMAS) research community and the “agent-oriented software engineering” (AOSE) research community. Even though the initiative for this seminar arose from the ProMAS community, we were delighted to attract many prominent researches from the AOSE community, which allowed us to achieve the positive result on the connection of ProMAS and AOSE research. In order to achieve the most productive setting for technical presentations and discussion in the various aspects we wanted to cover, we structured the talks in thematic days or half-days. In the first and last days, we included only AOSE-related talks. The second day was dedicated to ProMAS specifically, the morning of the third day we dedicated to Verification of Multi-Agent Systems; the fourth day had talks on Semantics in the morning and AOSE in the afternoon. Figure 1 shows in the detail the seminar schedule. We will now describe briefly each of those talks. After a brief opening by the organisers, the theme of the day was “agent-oriented software engineering”. Michael Winikoff discussed the gap between agent-oriented software engineering and agent-oriented programming languages, and discussed approaches and ongoing work to try to bridge such gap. This was followed by Leon Sterling who argued for a development methodology that would be accessible to the broader IT community (rather than researchers in multi-agent systems). Viviana Mascardi presented a combined