The 3rd Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems (FAABS-III) was held at the Greenbelt Marriott Hotel (near NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) in April 2004 in conjunction with the IEEE Computer Society. The first FAABS workshop was help in April 2000 and the second in October 2002. Interest in agent-based systems continues to grow and this is seen in the wide range of conferences and journals that are addressing the research in this area as well as the prototype and developmental systems that are coming into use. Our third workshop, FAABS-III, was held in April, 2004. This volume contains the revised papers and posters presented at that workshop. The Organizing Committee was fortunate in having significant support in the planning and organization of these events, and were privileged to have wor- renowned keynote speakers Prof. J Moore (FAABS-I), Prof. Sir Roger Penrose (FAABS-II), and Prof. John McCarthy (FAABS-III), who spoke on the topic of se- aware computing systems, auguring perhaps a greater interest in autonomic computing as part of future FAABS events. We are grateful to all who attended the workshop, presented papers or posters, and participated in panel sessions and both formal and informal discussions to make the workshop a great success. Our thanks go to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Codes 588 and 581 (Software Engineering Laboratory) for their financial support and to the IEEE Computer Society (Technical Committee on Complexity in Computing) for their sponsorship and organizational assistance.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems, FAABS 2002, held in Greenbelt, MD, in October 2002. The 18 revised full papers and 5 poster papers presented together with 9 panel statements and summaries were carefully selected for presentation during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Among the topics addressed are formal models for agent communication, communication protocols, logic-based agents, statechart frameworks, formal specification of agent interaction, space shuttle applications, automated satellite ground operations, formal verification, agent control, multi-agent coordination, agent languages, mobile agent testing, battlefield agents, XML, autonomous agents, etc.