A Practical Approach to Secure and Trusted Negotiation in MASs

In this paper 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, after a brief introduction, we provide in Section 2 an overview of our model and focus on some common problems related to trust and security in real-world negotiations. In Section 3, we address these problems 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. Then, in Section 4 we describe the rationale of an API that we implemented to provide developers with a usable means to realize trusted and secure MASs. In this section we also validate our model against some concrete and common scenarios related to the establishment of legally valid agreements. To conclude, Section 5 discusses our model and outlines directions of future development.