This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems, ProMAS 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, May 2006. Coverage includes uncertainty of agents; lightweight devices for business and e-commerce applications; component-based agents for MAS simulation; creation, execution, mobility and communication of agents; as well as multi-agent platforms and organization.
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.