Trust Management for Multi-Agent Systems Using Smart Contracts

Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), a group of agents that work together to solve complex problems, always have concerns around trust management among the agents in a cyber physical system. With the technological advancements in decentralization, automation, and interactions between physical and software agents, the demand for using MAS is increasing though trust management between the agents remain challenging. To alleviate these challenges, the focus of this paper is to explore blockchain based smart contracts for trust management in MAS, especially in the following three aspects: analyzing the interaction mechanism of smart contracts within a MAS environment; providing a potential framework for smart contract based trust management for MAS; and finally, discussing the challenges of deploying and integrating smart contracts within a MAS framework. The outcome of this paper provides a novel approach to solidifying agent to agent trustworthy communication.