Abstract
The Internet and the services delivered via it are increasingly centralised on a few monopolistic platforms. Today’s web frameworks are conceived to cater for increasing returns to scale and winner-takes-all business models with a built-in asymmetry between users and services. Existing multi-agent and agent architectures have seen no significant adoption outside niche applications. We propose a novel agent framework which is designed to allow for a decentralised digital economy to manifest where each individual and organisation is represented by an autonomous economic entity with its own agency. The framework bridges the old and new web and employs distributed ledger technologies as core parts of its construction. We introduce the framework, discuss the performance characteristics of its current implementation and demonstrate several application areas.
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Notes
- 1.
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Google.
- 2.
- 3.
A distributed ledger is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronised data where processing nodes are geographically and organisationally - no central control - spread across multiple entities. Bitcoin network is a permissionless DLT in the form of a blockchain, with proof of work as the consensus algorithm and Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency.
- 4.
Smart contracts are computer programmes which are executed by nodes of a DLT, usually a blockchain, and can, similar to objects, hold their own state. They can be used to automate enforcement of contract terms, reduce the need for trusted intermediaries and allow for reuse and encapsulation to create interoperable on-chain protocols like decentralised exchanges [2].
- 5.
The AEA framework’s repository can be found at https://github.com/fetchai/agents-aea.
- 6.
AEAs use Addresses for identification and for communication purposes. The Address is derived from the public key of a public-private key pair generated from the elliptic curve as specified by, for instance, the standard SECP256k1 [11].
- 7.
An analogy to the Model-View-Controller architecture prevalent in many web frameworks can be observed: Handlers have similarities to Controllers, and Messages can be considered the equivalent to Views.
- 8.
Details on reproducability are provided in Appendix A.
- 9.
The AEA framework is primarily targeting stand-alone AEA deployment matching its primary application as a multi-stakeholder MAS agent framework. This benchmark demonstrates that nevertheless multiple AEAs can be run in a single process.
- 10.
Code not public at point of publication. Video: https://youtu.be/VAVZALKAVlA.
- 11.
This acts as a spam protection and as an incentivisation mechanism.
- 12.
Code not public at point of publication. Video: https://youtu.be/TGZ6AX-KqCk.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Fetch.ai for supporting this research and the release of its implementation.
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1 Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
A Experiments
A Experiments
In this section, we provide instructions to reproduce the experiments.
1.1 A.1 Requirements
The framework can be used on any major platform (GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows). However, to run the benchmark, we suggest using UNIX-like systems (e.g. GNU/Linux or macOS).
Make sure your platform has the following software installed and the associated binaries accessible from the system path of your operating system:
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Python 3.8. This can be downloaded from here: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380/.
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Make sure you have Pip installed: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/. Also, the script requires that the CLI tool pip should point to pip3. Note that on some platforms this is not the default configuration.
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Git. This can be downloaded from here: https://git-scm.com/downloads.
1.2 A.2 Steps to Reproduce the Experiments
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Download the following script in your working directory to reproduce results: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fetchai/agents-aea/v0.10.1/benchmark/run_from_branch.sh. (Alternatively, for the latest version use: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fetchai/agents-aea/main/benchmark/run_from_branch.sh.)
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Assign execution permissions to the script. For example, on UNIX systems:
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Run the script:
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Minarsch, D., Favorito, M., Hosseini, S.A., Turchenkov, Y., Ward, J. (2022). Autonomous Economic Agent Framework. In: Alechina, N., Baldoni, M., Logan, B. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13190. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97457-2_14
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