Engineering Trust in Complex System through Mediating Infrastructures

Starting from the many research results on trust in state-of-the-art literature, we first point out some open problems related to trust in multiagent systems (MAS), focussing in particular on the issue of the engineering of agent societies, and on the role of agent infrastructures. Then, we discuss two infrastructural abstractions — coordination artifacts, and agent coordination contexts —, and show how they can be exploited for modelling and engineering trust within MAS.