The Good, the Bad, and the Ethical Implications of Bridging Blockchain and Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

The agent based approach is a well established methodology to model distributed intelligent systems. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are increasingly employed in applications dealing with safety and information critical tasks (e.g., in eHealth, financial, and energy domains). Therefore, transparency and the trustworthiness of the agents and their behaviors must be enforced. For example, employing reputation based mechanisms can promote the development of trust. Nevertheless, besides recent early stage studies, the existing methods and systems are still unable to guarantee the desired accountability and transparency adequately. In line with the recent trends, we advocate that combining blockchain technology (BCT) and MAS can achieve the distribution of the trust, removing the need for trusted third parties (TTP), potential single points of failure. This paper elaborates on the notions of trust, BCT, MAS, and their integration. Furthermore, to attain a trusted environment, this manuscript details the design and implementation of a system reconciling MAS (based on the Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE)) and BTC (based on Hyperledger Fabric). In particular, the agents' interactions, computation, tracking the reputation, and possible policies for disagreement-management are implemented via smart contracts and stored on an immutable distributed ledger. The results obtained by the presented system and similar solutions are also discussed. Finally, ethical implications (i.e., opportunities and challenges) are elaborated before concluding the paper.oriented approaches [6]. Instances of such approaches are multi-agent systems (MAS) [7] that recently gained a crucial role in the development of decentralized intelligent systems, often exchanging sensitive data among them [8]. In such a context, accountability and trusted interactions among trustworthy agents are crucial and entail a considerable number of technical and scientific challenges [9,10]. Although a number of contributions have been made around this topic, several aspects related to security and trust in MAS are still open challenges [11][12][13].Recent works [14][15][16][17] have fueled the idea of combining MAS and blockchain technologies (BCT) [18,19] in order to address some of these issues. In particular, BCT has the potential for enabling more secure, trusted, accountable, autonomous, and flexible interactions among distributed entities, removing the need for a centralized trusted third party or a trusted reputation handler. A recent systematic review [20] provided an extensive description of previous works and relevant attempts for developing models and technical implementations of BCT powered multi-agent systems. However, even if these promising results provide potential solutions for trust and security challenges in MAS, a number of undesired implications also emerge, generating new concerns that need to be addressed. ContributionIn this paper, we study the implications of pairing MAS and BCT, especially regarding the establishment of reputation mechanisms ...

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