Giovanni Ciatto, Stefano Mariani, Andrea Omicini

Blockchain technologies are rapidly gaining attention in the multi-agent systems (MAS) community to face critical issues such as trust, secured communications, and data consistency. In particular, the notion of smart contract can be exploited to deploy trustworthy computations automatically executed by the network in a consistent way. MAS coordination — modelling and engineering of agents interaction in a MAS — thus represents an appealing application field for smart contracts, potentially enabling fully-decentralised, trustworthy coordination. Along this line, we focus on the Ethereum blockchain technology, map it onto LINDA tuple-based coordination model, and discuss two proof-of-concept implementations of LINDA on Ethereum. We hence demonstrate conceptual and technical feasibility of blockchain-based coordination in MAS, while emphasising issues of applying the blockchain beyond accountability and identity management.

Keywords: blockchain, smart contracts, MAS, coordination, Linda, Ethereum, economy of coordination

2018 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI), pages 696-703, December 2018
1st International Workshop on Block Chain Technologies 4 Multi-Agent Systems (BCT4MAS 2018)

@inproceedings{bctcoord-bct4mas2018wi,
	Author = {Ciatto, Giovanni and Mariani, Stefano and Omicini, Andrea},
	Booktitle = {2018 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI)},
	Doi = {10.1109/WI.2018.000-9},
	IeeeNo = {8609674},
	IrisId = {11585/655099},
	Isbn = {978-1-5386-7325-6},
	Keywords = {blockchain, smart contracts, MAS, coordination, Linda, Ethereum, economy of coordination},
	Month = dec,
	Numpages = 8,
	Pages = {696--703},
	ScholarId = {168725511213458827},
	ScopusId = {2-s2.0-85061893707},
	Title = {Blockchain for Trustworthy Coordination: A First Study with {L}inda and {E}thereum},
	Url = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8609674},
	Year = 2018}