Programming Multi-Agent Systems [electronic resource] : 4th International Workshop, ProMAS 2006, Hakodate, Japan, May 9, 2006, Revised and Invited Papers / edited by Rafael H. Bordini, Mehdi Dastani, Jürgen Dix, Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni.

Invited Papers -- A Self-healing Approach to Designing and Deploying Complex, Distributed and Concurrent Software Systems -- Using Peer-to-Peer Protocols to Enable Implicit Communication in a BDI Agent Architecture -- I -- Asimovian Multiagents: Applying Laws of Robotics to Teams of Humans and Agents -- Persistent Architecture for Context Aware Lightweight Multi-agent System -- Architectural Design of Component-Based Agents: A Behavior-Based Approach -- II -- Comparing Apples with Oranges: Evaluating Twelve Paradigms of Agency -- Augmenting BDI Agents with Deliberative Planning Techniques -- ALBA: A Generic Library for Programming Mobile Agents with Prolog -- Bridging Agent Theory and Object Orientation: Agent-Like Communication Among Objects -- Adding Knowledge Updates to 3APL -- III -- Validation of BDI Agents -- A Tool Architecture to Verify Properties of Multiagent System at Runtime -- On the Application of Clustering Techniques to Support Debugging Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems -- Debugging Agents in Agent Factory.

These are the proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming Multi-AgentSystems (ProMAS2006),held onMay9,2006in Hakodate(Japan) asanassociatedeventofAAMAS 2006:themaininternationalconferenceon- tonomous agents and multi-agent systems (MAS). ProMAS 2006 was the fourth of a series of workshops that is attracting the increasing attention of researchers and practitioners in multi-agent systems. The idea of organizing the ?rst workshop of the series was ?rst discussed duringthe DagstuhlseminarProgrammingMulti-AgentSystemsBasedonLogic (see[6]),wherethefocus wasonlogic-based approaches. Itwasfeltthatthescope should be broadened beyond logic-based approaches, thus giving the current scope and aims of ProMAS [see [4] for the proceedings of the ?rst workshop (ProMAS2003),[1] for the proceedingsof the second workshop(ProMAS2004), and [3] for the proceedings of the third workshop (ProMAS 2005)]. All four events of the series were held as AAMAS workshops. Besides the ProMAS Steering Committee (Rafael Bordini, Mehdi Dastani, J¨ urgenDix,andAmalElFallahSeghrouchni),anAgentLinkIIITechnicalForum Group on Programming Multi-Agent Systems has been very active in the last couple of years (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/?mehdi/al3promas.htmlfor details on that group). Moreover, we have edited a book on Multi-Agent Programming [2], andProMAS2007willbe heldwith AAMAS 2007onMay12or13,inHonolulu, Hawaii (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/ProMAS/ for up-to-date information about ProMAS). At the next edition of this workshop series, ProMAS 2007, a Multi-Agent Contestwasorganized(see[5]andhttp://cig.in.tu-clausthal.de/AgentContest/).