Many challenges in today's society can be tackled by distributed open systems. This is particularly true for domains that are commonly perceived under the umbrella of smart cities, such as intelligent transportation, smart energy grids, or participative governance. When designing computer applications for these domains, it is necessary to account for the fact that the elements of such systems, often called software agents, are usually made by different designers and act on behalf of particular stakeholders. Furthermore, it is unknown at design time when such agents will enter or leave the system, and what interests new agents will represent. To instil coordination in such systems is particularly demanding, as usually only part of them can be directly controlled at runtime. Agreement technologies refer to a sandbox of tools and mechanisms for the development of such open multiagent systems, which are based on the notion of agreement. In this paper, we argue that agreement technologies are a suitable means for achieving coordination in smart city domains, and back our claim through examples of several real-world applications.

翻译：当今社会的许多挑战可以通过分布式开放系统来解决。这一点尤其适用于通常被归入智慧城市范畴的领域，如智能交通、智能电网或参与式治理。在设计针对这些领域的计算机应用时，必须考虑到这些系统的元素（通常称为软件智能体）通常由不同设计者创建，并代表特定利益相关者行事。此外，在设计阶段无法预知这些智能体何时进入或离开系统，也无法预知新智能体将代表何种利益。在此类系统中注入协调机制尤为困难，因为通常只有部分系统能够在运行时被直接控制。协议技术是指一套基于协议概念的工具和机制，用于开发此类开放的多智能体系统。本文认为，协议技术是实现智慧城市领域协调的合适手段，并通过若干实际应用案例为这一观点提供佐证。