Pragmatic-strategic reputation-based decisions in BDI agents

Computational trust and reputation models have been recognized as one of the key technologies required to design and implement agent systems. These models manage and aggregate the information needed by agents to efficiently perform partner selection in uncertain situations. For simple applications, a game theoretical approach similar to that used in most models can suffice. However, if we want to undertake problems found in socially complex virtual societies, we need more sophisticated trust and reputation systems. In this context, reputation-based decisions that agents make take on special relevance and can be as important as the reputation model itself. In this paper, we propose a possible integration of a cognitive reputation model, Repage, into a cognitive BDI agent. We define a BDI model as a multi-context system whose regular logical reasoning process incorporates reputation information. After introducing the theoretical model we focus on an example to illustrate and analyze the behavior of our BDI agents in several situations.