Dynamics of trust in logic-based multi-agent systems (DYTRIL)

Led by Prof. Dr. Leon Van Der Torre
Project duration: 01.01.2007 - 31.12.2010
Funding source(s): UL (formerly known as PRP: Doctoral project of Mathijs de Boer)

Trust is of central importance for the security and reliability of systems communicating in open networks, e.g. in the context of e-commerce, cyberdefense, or e-science. The design and description of autonomous cognitive agents seeking, evaluating, and merging information in opaque contexts requires a formal framework allowing the representation, extraction, and exploration of trust information, and in particular the possibility to reason about potentially unreliable and conflicting sources. However, existing approaches have been haunted by a static perspective, low expressivity, and inadequate semantic foundations.
The goal of the present project is to tackle these issues in the context of a logic-based multi-agent systems and to develop a powerful agent logic of trust, characterized by an expressive language, a transparent semantics, and a practically manageable proof-theory. We plan a partial empirical evaluation in the context of e-science.