An Architecture Approach to Dependable Trust-based Service Systems

A key challenge in emerging service-oriented computing is the need to establish trust-based loosely coupled partnerships between previously unknown services. A dependable trust framework is essential to capture and maintain realistic trust information based on different requirements of participating services. Most existing trust management frameworks assume that the participating services perform cooperative behavior rather than have strategic behavior for their own interests. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture approach to integrate auction mechanisms into trust framework in order to prevent benefits from untruthful incentives. This is achieved by defining an auction-based trust negotiation protocol and realizing it in the trust framework. This research also aims to examine the impacts that the resulting architecture has on the attributes of dependability in particular trustworthiness, performance and reliability as well as their dependencies. Test cases that capture the key scenarios of these quality attributes are devised and exercised to collect empirical evidence.