This carefully edited book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, ATAL'97, held in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, in July 1997. The 25 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 76 submissions.

Panel: Methodologies for multi-agent systems.- Designing embedded agents to optimize end-user objectives.- Agent architecture as object oriented design.- Implementation of a cooperative agent architecture based on the language-action perspective.- Toward the specification and design of industrial synthetic ecosystems.- Bidding mechanisms for data allocation in multi-agent environments.- Distributed storage of replicated beliefs to facilitate recovery of distributed intelligent agents.- A customizable coordination service for autonomous agents.- A behavior-based approach to reactivity and coordination: A preliminary report.- On explicit plan languages for coordinating multiagent plan execution.- Social comparison for failure detection and recovery.- Multi-agent coordination through coalition formation.- A formal specification of dMARS.- A framework for argumentation-based negotiation.- Agent modelling in MetateM and DESIRE.- Semantics for an agent communication language.- Formal semantics for an abstract agent programming language.- Intentional agents and goal formation.- A layered agent calculus with concurrent, continuous processes.- Approximate reasoning about combined knowledge.- On the epistemic foundations of agent theories.- Facilitating open communication in agent systems: The InfoSleuth infrastructure.- Competition for attention.- Analysis and design of multiagent systems using MAS-CommonKADS.- Multi agent systems as open societies — a design framework.- TKQML: A scripting tool for building agents.

Intelligent agents constitute one of the most important developments in computer science in the 1990s. This book, the fourth in the highly successful Intelligent Agents series, focuses on the synergies between theories, infrastructures, architectures, methodologies, formal methods, and languages of agents.