Agreement Technologies (AT) refer to computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements.
This Action aims at coordinating national efforts on a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems, based on the concept of agreement between computational agents. An entity may choose whether to fulfil an agreement or not, and it should fulfil it when there is an obligation to do so derived from the standing agreements. Autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are the characteristics that the paradigm will cover from a theoretical and practical perspective. Semantic alignment, negotiation, argumentation, virtual organisations, learning, real time, and several other technologies will be in the sandbox to define, specify and verify such systems. Both functional and non-functional properties are to be studied. Security on execution will be based on trust and reputation measures. These measures will help agents to determine with whom to interact and what terms and conditions to accept.