BCT4MAS2018

Human beings are increasingly connected through uncountable interlinked electronic devices that perform ubiquitous computing. As a consequence, scientific research is pushing towards the design and development of autonomous and collaborative systems and devices that interact and compete with each other, often emulating humankind dynamics.
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are widely used for the development of intelligent distributed systems, including cases that deal with highly sensitive data, such as ambient assisted living, healthcare, and energy trading. An agent can be rationalized as an autonomous entity observing its surrounding environment through a perception layer, and possibly interacting with it, as well as with other agents. These intelligent agents are also able to perform distributed reasoning exploiting their knowledge base. It can be extended and updated, thus renewing their plans to achieve the desired goals. In MAS, a solution to given problem to be solved is delivered through autonomous actions and interactions between many agents rather than by any single “smart” agent. Hence, MAS are generally composed of loosely coupled agents interconnected and organized in a network, each of them having the ability to solve problems and attain its goals by interacting with each other through collaboration, negotiation, and competition patterns.

Recently, BCT has been proposed as a peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that can provide a shared, immutable, and transparent history of all the events intercurred among all the participants in a given network. Currently, MAS require trusted mediators storing the transactions among the agents. These mediators can be replaced with a distributed ledger technology: BCT properties can ensure that no corruption of topics or moderators would impact on the reliability of the network.
For example, systems handling societal information and dealing with hundreds/thousands of nodes to manage sensitive information can benefit from the combination of MAS and BCT. Such systems need the crucial feature guaranteed by MAS, as much the traceability and immutability ensured by the BCT.

This workshop aims at offering a common ground to researchers from diverse areas to share experiences about possible outcomes of combining MAS and BCT.
In particular, the submitted papers should address how MAS and BCT can be used together in one or more of the following (scientific and applied) topics:

Theoretical track:

Main properties of blockchain technology

Self-aware and smart contracts

Reputation management

Decision-making for policy

Secure identity assurance

Security and privacy management

Trust and data integrity

Procurement

Conflict resolution in business collaboration

Task allocation, coordination, and supervision

Agreement technologies and artificial institutions

Big data management in highly distributed environments

Anonymization of distributed data

Applied track:

Distributed energy grids

Collaborative governance

Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAO)

Distributed artificial intelligence

Swarm robotics

Coordination models in Internet-of-Things (IoT)

E-commerce and demand-supply relationships

Software life-cycle management

E-government

Sharing economy