内容简介

Within only a few years, intelligent agents, and more generally the agent paradigm, developed from a research area primarily studied in AI labs into a full-fledged new technology attracting interest from the whole IT community and a variety of application fields. In order to facilitate use of the powerful aparatus available in the meantime by software engineers dealing with the complex problems occuring in the design of inteUigent software systems, emphasis now is placed on developing principled techniques and tools for analyzing, speci-fying, designing, and verifying agent-based systems.
This book is the seventh in the successful line of Intelligent Agents volumes published in LNAI. It is based on the seventh workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, ATAL 2000, held in Boston, MA, USA in July zooo. The 21 revised full papers included were selected from a total of 71 submissions during two rounds of reviewing. Also included are one panel summary and the statements of panelists participating in another panel held during ATAL 2000.The book is divided into topical sections on agent theories; agent development tools and platforms; models of agent communication and coordination; autonomy and models of agent coordination;agent languages; and planning, decision making, and learning.This state-of-the-art surveyis essential reading for anyone interested in agent technology.