Trust-Based Facilitator: Handling Word-of-Mouth Trust for Agent-Based E-Commerce

This paper proposes a facilitator which finds capable and trustworthy partners on behalf of client users (agents), which helps agents form and maintain e-partnerships for electronic commerce. Unlike existing capability-based facilitators or matchmakers, the facilitator collects and maintains private “word-of-mouth” trust information as well as capabilities from each agent and uses the information for personalized trust-based facilitation for each agent, which is performed through the facilitation protocols and trust propagation mechanism. Compared to other existing trust mechanisms, the characteristics of trust which this facilitator handles are personalizedcollaborative-subjective-qualitative-private. The facilitator is implemented as a JATLite multi-agent system and a FIPA-OS based multi-agent system, and is evaluated in terms of the complexity and characteristics. The example of usage is shown in the area of construction supply-chain coordination.