The First CLIMA Contest

Multi-agent systems are beginning to play an important role in today’s software development. This competition is an attempt to stimulate research in the area of multi-agent systems by identifying key problems and collecting suitable benchmarks that can serve as milestones for testing new approaches and techniques from computational logics. While there exist several competitions in various parts of artificial intelligence (theorem proving, planning, robo-cup etc) and, lately, also in specialised areas in agent systems (trading agents), the emphasis of this contest is on the use of ‘computational logic’ in (multi-) agent systems. We expect to promote the development of multi-agent systems by first identifying difficult problems and then finding solutions by comparing different approaches from computational logic for solving them. While this idea seems very appealing, it is not an easy task to come up with a particular scenario that serves as a basis for a contest. Such a scenario should be generic enough to be applicable for a wide range of techniques of computational logic, but it should also be precise enough so that different approaches can be tested and compared against each other.