Coordination and Trust in MAS Towards Intelligent Socio-technical Systems

The discipline of intelligent systems engineering is slowly moving towards its presumable final destination – that is, agent-oriented software engineering –, whereas multi-agent systems emerge as the apparent source for abstractions, technologies, and methods for intelligent socio-technical systems. There, fundamental notions such as trust and coordination play a key role in the modelling and engineering of multi-agent systems: yet, even though they both insist on the same conceptual space – the space of agent and MAS interaction – the intrinsic nature of their relationship has not been explored deeply enough till now.

We try and provide a brief look at the two concepts, as they developed in the literature in the last decades, then focus on some possible dimensions around which their understanding and definition could possibly be framed in a comprehensive and coherent way; finally, we discuss a case study of a blockchain-based infrastructure providing for trustworthy coordination.