Smart Contracts for Multiagent Plan Execution in Untrusted Cyber-physical Systems
This addresses plan reliability in distributed, untrusted multi-agent systems, but appears incremental as it applies existing smart contract technology to a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of plan failure in untrusted cyber-physical systems due to agents not respecting protocols, by proposing to implement agent execution through smart contracts, resulting in a generic architecture that integrates intelligent planning-based CPS with smart contracts.
Intelligent Cyber-physical systems can be modelled as multi-agent systems with planning capability to impart adaptivity for changing contexts. In such multi-agent systems, the protocol for plan execution must result in the proper completion and ordering of actions in spite of their distributed execution. However, in untrusted scenarios, there is a possibility of agents not respecting the protocol either due to faults or due to malicious reasons thereby resulting in plan failure. In order to prevent such situations, we propose to implement the execution of agents through smart contracts. This points to a generic architecture seamlessly integrating intelligent planning-based CPS and smart-contracts.