A real-world approach to secure and trusted negotiation in MASs

ABSTRACT

The problem of providing tools to support legally valid negotiations between agents is becoming more and more critical. Agents are supposed to perform crucial tasks autonomously; however, they cannot exploit an extensive set of laws since the development of a full legal corpus for the computer world is yet to come. In this work we present an innovative model of interaction between agents that leads to an increase in the level of trust in negotiation-intensive MASs. In particular, we address some common problems related to trust and security in real-world negotiations and outline a set of abstractions that we can use to increase the level of trust that we can expect from agreements with third parties.

REFERENCES

• 1: CASCOM Web site http://www.ist-cascom.org
• 2: Ellison, C., SPKI Requirements. IETF RFC 2692, 1999.
• 3: Gambetta, D. (Ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations, Basil Blackwell, 1985.
• 4: Szomszor, M., and Moreau, L., Recording and reasoning over data provenance in web and grid services, in Procs. of ODBASE'03, LNCS, 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

General Terms:
Legal Aspects, Security

Keywords:
multiagent systems, privacy, security, trust