Abstract
Features of blockchain technology (BCT) such as decentralisation, trust, fault tolerance, and accountability, are of paramount importance for multi-agent systems (MAS). In this paper we argue that a principled approach to MAS-BCT integration cannot overlook the foundational character of agency—that is, autonomy. Accordingly, we present a custom BCT implementation where autonomy is placed in smart contracts (SC) interpreted as software agents. We show how agency can enhance SC expressiveness with autonomy, situatedness, sociality, and intelligence, and highlight the limitations of state-of-art BCT in supporting MAS design and implementation.
Keywords
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Source code publicly available at [12].
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We rely on Prolog standard notation for input/output arguments: + is an input, + is an output, ? can be both, whereas @ is a ground input.
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Ciatto, G., Maffi, A., Mariani, S., Omicini, A. (2019). Towards Agent-Oriented Blockchains: Autonomous Smart Contracts. In: Demazeau, Y., Matson, E., Corchado, J., De la Prieta, F. (eds) Advances in Practical Applications of Survivable Agents and Multi-Agent Systems: The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11523. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24209-1_3
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