Trust and deception in multi-agent trading systems: a logical viewpoint

Trust and deception have been of concern to researchers since the earliest research into multi-agent trading systems (MATS). In an open trading environment, trust can be established by external mechanisms e.g. using secret keys or digital signatures or by internal mechanisms e.g. learning and reasoning from experience. However, in a MATS, where distrust exists among the agents, and deception might be used between agents, how to recognize and remove fraud and deception in MATS becomes a significant issue in order to maintain a trustworthy MATS environment. This paper will propose an architecture for a multi-agent trading system (MATS) and explore how fraud and deception changes the trust required in a multi-agent trading system/environment. This paper will also illustrate several forms of logical reasoning that involve trust and deception in a MATS. The research is of significance in deception recognition and trust sustainability in e-business and e-commerce

Multi-agent system security for mobile communication

This thesis investigates security in multi-agent systems for mobile communication. Mobile as well as non-mobile agent technology is addressed. A general security analysis based on properties of agents and multi-agent systems is presented along with an overview of security measures applicable to multi-agent systems, and in particular to mobile agent systems. A security architecture, designed for deployment of agent technology in a mobile communication environment, is presented. The security architecture allows modelling of interactions at all levels within a mobile communication system. This architecture is used as the basis for describing security services and mechanisms for a multi-agent system. It is shown how security mechanisms can be used in an agent system, with emphasis on secure agent communication. Mobile agents are vulnerable to attacks from the hosts on which they are executing. Two methods for dealing with threats posed by malicious hosts to a trading agent are presented. The rst approach uses a threshold scheme and multiple mobile agents to minimise the eect of malicious hosts. The second introduces trusted nodes into the infrastructure. Undetachable signatures have been proposed as a way to limit the damage a malicious host can do by misusing a signature key carried by a mobile agent. This thesis proposes an alternative scheme based on conventional signatures and public key certicates. Threshold signatures can be used in a mobile agent scenario to spread the risk between several agents and thereby overcome the threats posed by individual malicious hosts. An alternative to threshold signatures, based on conventional signatures, achieving comparable security guarantees with potential practical advantages compared to a threshold scheme is proposed in this thesis. Undetachable signatures and threshold signatures are both concepts applicable to mobile agents. This thesis proposes a technique combining the two schemes to achieve undetachable threshold signatures. This thesis denes the concept of certicate translation, which allows an agent to have one certicate translated into another format if so required, and thereby save storage space as well as being able to cope with a certicate format not foreseen at the time the agent was created

Modeling Big Data based Systems through Ontological Trading

One of the great challenges the information society faces is dealing with the huge amount of information generated and handled daily on the Internet. Today, progress in Big Data proposals attempt to solve this problem, but there are certain limitations to information search and retrieval due basically to the large volumes handled, the heterogeneity of the information and its dispersion among a multitude of sources. In this article, a formal framework is defined to facilitate the design and development of an Environmental Management Information System which works with an heterogeneous and large amount of data. Nevertheless, this framework can be applied to other information systems that work with Big Data, since it does not depend on the type of data and can be utilized in other domains. The framework is based on an Ontological Web-Trading Model (OntoTrader) which follows Model-Driven Engineering and Ontology-Driven Engineering guidelines to separate the system architecture from its implementation. The proposal is accompanied by a case study, SOLERES-KRS, an Environmental Knowledge Representation System designed and developed using Software Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

A demand-driven approach for a multi-agent system in Supply Chain Management

This paper presents the architecture of a multi-agent decision support system for Supply Chain Management (SCM) which has been designed to compete in the TAC SCM game. The behaviour of the system is demand-driven and the agents plan, predict, and react dynamically to changes in the market. The main strength of the system lies in the ability of the Demand agent to predict customer winning bid prices - the highest prices the agent can offer customers and still obtain their orders. This paper investigates the effect of the ability to predict customer order prices on the overall performance of the system. Four strategies are proposed and compared for predicting such prices. The experimental results reveal which strategies are better and show that there is a correlation between the accuracy of the models' predictions and the overall system performance: the more accurate the prediction of customer order prices, the higher the profit. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Adaptive use of task assignment models in team-based mobile business processes

Most mobile business processes are executed under uncertain and dynamic working environments. This makes the traditional centralized approach for the management of mobile tasks inappropriate to respond to the changes in working environment quickly as collecting the changing information from geographically distributed workforces in real time is expensive if not impossible. This raises the need of a distributed approach in the management of mobile tasks. This paper proposes a distributed architecture for team-based coordination support for mobile task management. In this architecture, tasks are managed via peer-to-peer style coordination between team members who have better understanding on the changing working environment than a centralised system. The novelty of the design of the architecture is explained by applying it to a real business process in the UK

Realising Team-Working in the Field: An Agent-based Approach

Multi-agent systems technology is applied to enable co-operation between mobile workers in the field, minimising user intervention and increasing reachability. A component-based approach is taken to simplify the management of deployed co-operation services. A Personal Assistant running on a mobile device is introduced to show how an intelligent and autonomous agent can increase the utility of users during workforce co-operation processes. Finally, a real world trial of the technology by network installation and maintenance engineers in the UK is described. Some technical issues revealed during the trial are discussed, as is the impact of the technology on the business process

Can models of agents be transferred between different areas?

One of the main reasons for the sustained activity and interest in the field of agent-based systems, apart from the obvious recognition of its value as a natural and intuitive way of understanding the world, is its reach into very many different and distinct fields of investigation. Indeed, the notions of agents and multi-agent systems are relevant to fields ranging from economics to robotics, in contributing to the foundations of the field, being influenced by ongoing research, and in providing many domains of application. While these various disciplines constitute a rich and diverse environment for agent research, the way in which they may have been linked by it is a much less considered issue. The purpose of this panel was to examine just this concern, in the relationships between different areas that have resulted from agent research. Informed by the experience of the participants in the areas of robotics, social simulation, economics, computer science and artificial intelligence, the discussion was lively and sometimes heated

Flexible Decision Control in an Autonomous Trading Agent

An autonomous trading agent is a complex piece of software that must operate in a competitive economic environment and support a research agenda. We describe the structure of decision processes in the MinneTAC trading agent, focusing on the use of evaluators – configurable, composable modules for data analysis and prediction that are chained together at runtime to support agent decision-making. Through a set of examples, we show how this structure supports sales and procurement decisions, and how those decision processes can be modified in useful ways by changing evaluator configurations. To put this work in context, we also report on results of an informal survey of agent design approaches among the competitors in the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM).autonomous trading agent;decision processes

Implementing an Agent Trade Server

An experimental server for stock trading autonomous agents is presented and made available, together with an agent shell for swift development. The server, written in Java, was implemented as proof-of-concept for an agent trade server for a real financial exchange.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, intended for B/W printin