Secure multi-agent system for multi-hop environments

Abstract

Multi-agent systems allow a multitude of heterogenous systems to collaborate in a simple manner. It is easy to provide and gather information, distribute work and coordinate tasks without bothering with the differences of the underlying systems. Unfortunately, multiple networking and security problems arise from the dynamic behavior of multi-agent systems and the distributed heterogeneous environments in which they are used. With our work we provide a solution enabling secure collaboration and agent execution as well as agent mobility in multi-hop environments. We achieve this by using a secure unstructured P2P framework as communication layer and integrate it with a well known multi-agent system. © Springer-Verlag 2010.