T-LAIMA: Answer Set Programming for Modelling Agents with Trust

In a time where multi-agent systems (MAS) become increasingly more popular, they come in many forms and shapes depending on the requirements of the agents that need to populate them. Amongst the more demanding properties with respect to the design and implementation is how these agents may individually reason and communicate about their knowledge and beliefs, with a view to cooperation and collaboration. With information coming from various sources, it becomes vital for agents to have an idea how reliable these information providers are, especially if they start to contradict each other. In this paper we present a hybrid multi-agent platform, called T-LAIMA, using an extension of answer set programming (ASP). We show that our framework is capable of dealing with the specification and implementation of the system’s architecture, communication and the individual reasoning capacities of the agents. We discuss both the theoretical framework which models a single, fixed encounter between a number of agents and the implemenation that sets ups these encounters in a open multi-agent domain.