. Multi-Agent Systems
Multi-Agent Systems are communities of problem-solving entities that can perceive and act upon their environment to achieve their individual goals as well as joint goals. The work on such systems integrates many technologies and concepts in artificial intelligence and other areas of computing as well as other disciplines. Over recent years, the agent paradigm gained popularity, due to its applicability to a full spectrum of domains, from search engines to educational aids to electronic commerce and trade, e-procurement, recommendation systems, simulation and routing, to cite only some.
Computational logic provides a well-defined, general, and rigorous framework for studying syntax, semantics and procedures for various tasks by individual agents, as well as interaction amongst agents in multi-agent systems, for implementations, environments, tools, and standards, and for linking together specification and verification of properties of individual agents and multi-agent systems.
VERICS - a prototype verification system (for scientific purposes so far) aimed at verifying distributed systems described either as timed automata or in the specification language ESTELLE. The present version of the system allows for verification of the reachability properties.
Experimental designs can be thought of as arrangements of elements of a set into subsets with pre-determined properties desirable for particular applications in particular situations. Such arrangements are characterised and described by various factors, including: their current and potential fields of application, such as in cryptographic protocols, or in planning sample surveys or clinical experiments or marking schemes for tests, and so on; their properties; their size and complexity; and their origins, possibly from algebraic structures or from finite geometries or from computer search, or from some combination of these.