Strategies for Exploiting Trust Models in Competitive Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems where agents compete against one another in a specific environment pose challenges in relation to the trust modeling of an agent aimed at ensuring the right decisions are taken. A lot of literature has focused on describing trust models, but less in developing strategies to use them optimally. In this paper we propose a decision-making strategy that uses the information provided by the trust model to take the best decisions to achieve the most benefits for the agent. This decision making tackles the exploration versus exploitation problem since the agent has to decide when to interact with the known agents and when to look for new ones. The experiments were performed using the ART Testbed, a simulator created with the goal of objectively evaluate different trust strategies. The agent competed in and won the Third International ART Testbed Competition held in Estoril (Portugal) in March 2008.