How Can We Trust Agents in Multi-Agent Environments? Techniques and Challenges

The field of Multi-agent systems (MAS) has been an active area for many years due to the importance that agents have to many disciplines of research in computer science. MAS are open and dynamic systems where a number of autonomous software components, called agents, communicate and cooperate in order to achieve their goals. In such systems, trust plays an important role. There must be a way for an agent to make sure that it can trust another entity, which is a potential partner. Without trust, agents cannot cooperate effectively and without cooperation they cannot fulfill their goals. Many times, trust is based on reputation. It is an indication that we may trust someone. This important research area is investigated in this book chapter. We discuss main issues concerning reputation and trust in MAS. We present research efforts and give formalizations useful for understanding the two concepts.