An integrated trust and reputation model for open multi-agent systems

  • Authors:

  • Trung Dong Huynh;Nicholas R. Jennings;Nigel R. Shadbolt

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK SO17 1BJ;School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK SO17 1BJ;School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK SO17 1BJ

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Trust and reputation are central to effective interactions in open multi-agent systems (MAS) in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, continuously enter and leave the system. This openness means existing trust and reputation models cannot readily be used since their performance suffers when there are various (unforseen) changes in the environment. To this end, this paper presents FIRE, a trust and reputation model that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive assessment of an agent's likely performance in open systems. Specifically, FIRE incorporates interaction trust, role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation to provide trust metrics in most circumstances. FIRE is empirically evaluated and is shown to help agents gain better utility (by effectively selecting appropriate interaction partners) than our benchmarks in a variety of agent populations. It is also shown that FIRE is able to effectively respond to changes that occur in an agent's environment.