Over recent years, the notion of agency has claimed a major role in de?ning the trends of modern research. In?uencing a broad spectrum of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, philosophy and many more, the agent paradigm virtually invaded every sub?eld of computer science, because of its promising applications for the Internet and in robotics. Multi-agent systems (MAS) are communities of problem-solving entities that can perceive and act upon their environments to achieve their individual goals as well as joint goals. The work on such systems integrates many technologies and concepts in...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR '97, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in July 1997.
The volume presents 19 revised regular papers together with 10 system descriptions and five abstracts of invited presentations. The papers included report state-of-the-art research and development in the interdisciplinary area of logic programming and logical foundations of artificial intelligence.

This proceedings volume contains revised and reviewed papersbased on talks presented at the first International Workshopon Nonmonotonic and Inductive Logic held in Karlsruhe, December 1990. The workshop was supported by theVolkswagen-Stiftung, Hannover, and provided a forum forresearchers from the two fields to communicate and findareas of cooperation. The papersare organized into sectionson: - Nonmonotonicity in logic programs- Axiomatic approach to nonmonotonic reasoning- Inductive inference- Autoepistemic logic- Belief updatesThe bulk of the papers are devoted to nonmonotonic logic...