A reputation-oriented trust model for multi-agent environments
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to enhance trust in multi-agent systems by presenting a new computational model, named reputation-distribute-conflict (R-D-C), to select the most trustworthy provider agent based on computing reputation, disrepute, and conflict of each provider agent.
Design/methodology/approach
R-D-C propose based on three vital components for evaluating trustworthiness of providers as reputation, disrepute, and conflict, where disrepute is a component almost all trust models ignored. The R-D-C model presents a computational method for evaluating to select the most trustworthy provider agent. In order to evaluate the R-D-C model, the experimentation was carried out in two stages, by designing a simulated multi-agent environment. First, the accuracy of the R-D-C model in computing R-D-C was investigated. Second, the performance of the model was compared with other existing trust models. Moreover, comparison of the performance of the R-D-C model with other models demonstrates that the R-D-C model performs significantly better than the other models. Therefore, the R-D-C model is capable of evaluating the trustworthiness of agents more accurately and it can select the most trustworthy provider better than the other models.
Findings
The results show that the R-D-C model works well in different multi-agent environments, even when the number of untrustworthy providers is higher than that of the trustworthy ones.
Originality/value
The R-D-C model is useful for researchers to enhance the safety of online transactions in multi-agent environments, especially if the researchers explore more components; in fact the R-D-C model is capable of adding these new components and selects the most trustworthy provider agent.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to extend their gratitude to Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) Science fund (SF007-2015), and University of Malaya (RP028A-14AET) for supporting this research.
Citation
Majd, E. and Balakrishnan, V. (2016), "A reputation-oriented trust model for multi-agent environments", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 116 No. 7, pp. 1380-1396. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-06-2015-0256
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited