An Accusation-Based Strategy to Handle Undesirable Behaviour in Multi-agent Systems

Self-integration in open, distributed technical systems needs a mechanism for establishing and evaluating trust relationships to work in a stable and efficient manner. Based on a case study concerned with a Trusted Desktop Grid, this paper investigates techniques to isolate malicious agents. Therefore, we introduce a novel distributed strategy to identify and accuse nonbenevolentagents. Since intentionally bad behaviour is comparatively easy to detect, we further present novel agent types that either exploit the system or behave inconsistently. Afterwards, we demonstrate the potential benefit of the strategy in terms of simulations of the Trusted Desktop Grid and show that the overall system performance can be improved significantly.