Autonomous trust construction in multi-agent systems - a graph theory methodology

Trust mechanism always has two popular architectures: centralized fashion and distributed fashion. However, those two architectures are not well suited for multi-agent system since they cannot achieve the trust management autonomy. To achieve the trust management autonomy, the paper presents an autonomous trust construction model based on graph theory methodology. The presented model adopts the graph to describe the trust information, and uses the graph combination and path searching to construct the trust relation. Every agent can implement trust management autonomously; agent system can construct the global trust concept by the combination of trust information among agents; an agent can achieve the trust relation with other agent by trust path searching or trust negotiation. The simulation experiment results prove that the autonomous trust construction based on graph theory methodology is effective. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.