Trust Management – From Pervasive Computing Environments to Mathematical Economy and Sociology

Trust management in pervasive computing environments is one of top research areas for quite some years. Although first efforts started in the mid-nineties, the real momentum came some twelve years ago. From that time such methodologies started to appear that were addressing the core of trust phenomenon. Among those naïve Bayesian statistics based methodologies should be mentioned first, then Dempster-Shaffer Theory of evidence based ones, and game theoretic ones. A different perspective, based on linguistic grounds as to operators and operands, has been taken by Qualitative Assessment Dynamics, or QAD, which is presented in this paper. QAD effectively complements other existing methodologies by addressing uncovered issues, like assumptions of rational agents, transitivity of trust, and so on. QAD enables rigorous formal treatment, is implementable in computing environments, and provides multi-disciplinary results that exceed computational environments. Its results can be used as a basis for simulations to address important questions like how to manage societies to increase possibilities that they will become more prospective in terms of pre-assured trusted relationships.