A specification of the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) testbed: experimentation and competition for trust in agent societies

A diverse collection of trust-modeling algorithms for multi-agent systems has been developed in recent years, resulting in significant breadth-wise growth without unified direction or benchmarks. Based on enthusiastic response from the agent trust community, the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Testbed initiative has been launched, charged with the task of establishing a testbed for agent trust- and reputation-related technologies. This testbed serves in two roles: (1) as a competition forum in which researchers can compare their technologies against objective metrics, and (2) as a suite of tools with flexible parameters, allowing researchers to perform customizable, easily-repeatable experiments. This paper first enumerates trust research objectives to be addressed in the testbed and desirable testbed characteristics, then presents a competition testbed specification that is justified according to these requirements. In the testbed's artwork appraisal domain, agents, who valuate paintings for clients, may gather opinions from other agents to produce accurate appraisals. The testbed's implementation architecture is discussed briefly, as well.