Identifying Factors for Managing Trust in Multi Agent Systems

Trust management is becoming crucial in open systems because they may contain malicious and untrustworthy service providers. Trust management in multi-agent systems (used to model open systems) has gained a huge amount of attention from researchers in recent years. In our previous work, we proposed a generic agent trust management framework, called ScubAA, which is based on the theory of Human Plausible Reasoning. ScubAA first recommends to the trustor (e.g. a user) a personalized ranked list of the most trusted trustees (e.g. service providers), within the context of the trustor's request, and then forwards the request to those trusted trustees only. In this article, we are particularly interested in comparing, from a theoretical perspective, ScubAA with four other trust management systems that we selected from the vast literature on trust management. This comparison highlights significant factors that agent trust management systems utilize in their trust evaluation process. It also shows that ScubAA is able to consider more trust evidences towards a more accurate value of trust. Indeed, ScubAA introduces a single unified framework that considers various important aspects of trust management, such as the trustor’s feedback, history of trustor’s interactions, context of the trustor's request, third-party references from trustors as well as from trustees, and the structure of the society of trustor and trusteeagents. Keywords-Trust Management; Multi Agent Systems; Human Plausible Reasoning; Trust-based Service Selection; Trust Factors