Reputation-Based Distributed Coordination for Heterogeneous Autonomous Agents

Decentralized, partially or fully distributed multi-agent coordination, cooperation and coalition formation have been studied extensively over the past 20 years. Ensembles of autonomous software, robotic or other autonomous agents may need to coordinate and form coalitions in order to share resources, divide-and-conquer tasks, or enable themselves to complete tasks too complex for any individual agent alone. Much of prior research on multi-agent coordination and coalition formation focuses on the distributed problem solving context, in which all agents belong to the same end-user and share the overarching system-level objectives. As the Internet is evolving towards “Web 3.0” and “the Internet of Things”, modeling systems and designing protocols for scenarios in which autonomous agents that belong to different end-users, and hence in general do not share common goals, yet may still need to coordinate and cooperate with each other, is becoming a research challenge of paramount importance. In this paper, we outline a general vision and some key properties of an “Internet of (Software) Agents”, and propose a reputation-based model for effective multi-agent coordination among autonomous agents that need to coordinate with (yet don't a priori know to what extent they can trust) each other.