1. temporal foundations of agent theory;

2. temporal specification of agents;

3. agent execution using temporal techniques;

4. temporal verification of agents; and

5. use of temporal reasoning within agent computation.

The last of these utilises many techniques described elsewhere in this collection; thus we will not discuss this aspect here. Instead we will expand upon the use of temporal reasoning in the first four areas. While we cannot hope to address of all activity in the area, we aim to provide the reader with a sense of how (and why) temporal reasoning has been, and continues to be, important in agent-based systems. (This chapter represents a combination and extension of material from [Fisher and Wooldridge, 1997], [Wooldridge, 2000] and [Fisher, 2004].)

We begin, in Section 15.1, with some background on agents and multi-agent systems followed, in Section 15.2, by some logical preliminaries. In the subsequent four sections, we consider temporal aspects of agent theories (Section 15.3), agent specification (Section 15.4), agent execution (Section 15.5), and agent verification (Section 15.6). Finally, in Section 15.7, we present some concluding remarks.