Controller-Based Interactive Proof to Ensure Trust in Multiagent Systems

When multiple agents need to perform tasks that need cooperation, communication is necessary for coordination and also to assess completion. In this case, trust needs to be guaranteed, so agents know if others are following a common strategy. If communication is explicit, other agents, including agents that are not involved directly in the mission, can forge information and lead agents to believe that they are behaving according to the mission plan. Several methods have been proposed in the literature, and in this article, we propose a novel method based on interactive proofs in which trust between two agents is asserted by one agent demonstrating to the other that both follow the same mission plan. We formally represent the problem as a series of Markov decision processes and demonstrate that the formulation is complete and sound. Simulations of multiple agents in a maze problem demonstrate the behavior of the system.