LAM'10: Editor's Preface

The aim of this series of workshops is to bring together active researchers in the areas of logics and other formal frameworks that can be used to describe and analyse dynamic or mobile systems. The main focus is on the field of logics and calculi for mobile agents, and multi-agent systems.

Many notions used in the theory of agents are derived from philosophy, logics, and linguistics (belief, desire, intention, speech act, etc.), and interdisciplinary discourse has proved fruitful for the advance of this domain. The workshop intends to encourage discussion and work across the boundaries of the traditional disciplines.

Outside of academia, distributed systems are a reality and agent programming is beginning established itself as a serious contender against more traditional programming paradigms. For example, the deployment of large-scale pervasive infrastructures (mobile ad-hoc networks, mobile devices, RFIDs, etc.) raises a number of scientific and technological challenges for the modelling and programming of such large-scale, open and highly-dynamic distributed systems. The agent and multi-agent systems approach seems particularly adapted to tackle this challenge, but there are many issues remaining to be investigated. For instance, the agents must be location-aware since the actual services available to them may depend on their (physical or virtual) location. The quality and quantity of resources at their disposal is also largely fluctuant, and the agents must be able to adapt to such highly dynamic environments. Moreover, mobility itself raises a large number of difficult issues related to safety and security, which require the ability to reason about the software (e.g. for analysis or verification).

Logics and type systems with temporal or other kinds of modalities (relating to location, resource and/or security-awareness) play a central role in the semantic characterisation and verification of mobile agent systems. In the past two or three years, some logics have been proposed that would be able to handle certain aspects of these requirements, but there are still many open problems and research questions in the theory of such systems. The workshop is intended to showcase results and current work being undertaken in the areas outlined above with a focus on logics and other formalisms for the specification and verification of dynamic, mobile systems.

Scope of Interest:

• Specification and reasoning about agents, MAS, and mobile systems,
• modal and temporal logics,
• model-checking,
• treatment of location and resources in logic,
• security,
• type systems and static analysis,
• logic programming,
• concurrency theory with a focus on mobility or dynamics in agent systems.

Previous Workshops in this series:

• LAM'08: 4--8 August 2008 at ESSLI in Hamburg, Germany
• LAM'09: 10 August 2009 at LICS in Los Angeles, USA

This volume contains the papers presented at LAM'10: 3rd International Workshop on Logics, Agents, and Mobility held on 14 July 2010 in Edinburgh.

There were 9 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least 2, and on the average 2.4, program committee members. The committee decided to accept 7 papers. The program also includes 2 invited talks.