An adaptive and Socially-Compliant Trust Management System for virtual communities

Abstract

Virtual communities (VCs) are open socio-technical structures wherein autonomous entities (i.e. agents) with common objectives join together to mutually satisfy their goals. The success of these communities relies on collaboration and resource sharing principals, making trust a critical issue for each member. Such environments motivate the need for more flexible trust models wherein both individual (i.e. user-centred) and collective (i.e. community-centred) trust requirements are considered in the decision making-process.This paper reports our on-going efforts in that perspective and presents our Adaptive and Socially-Compliant Trust Management System (ASC-TMS). Policies are used, in the system, to specify individual and collective trust requirements, while meta-policies enable agents to dynamically adapt their policies and make socially-compliant trust decisions through automatic combination of individual and collective policies.

An Agent Based Trust Management System for Multi-Agent Based Virtual Communities

“…The ASC-TMS identifies the request pattern and selects the appropriate trust pattern that includes an individual policy (IP) and a collective policy (CP). Then the individual policy goes through three adaptation phases that corresponds to instantiation (the individual policy is adapted with respect to environment constraints), negotiation (the policy is adapted to fit partner's constraints) and combination (the policy is adapted in compliance with the constraints imposed by the collective policy) (see [10] for more details). The generated policy is then evaluated with respect to trust information (i.e.…”

“…Concretely, each trust factor describes a trait characterizing (e.g. identity or reputation) the agents on which restrictions can be expressed using policies (for more details see [10]). …”

“…We used this mechanism to implement the instantiation, negotiation and combination adaptations defined in the ASC-TMS architecture. Due to space limitations, how these actions are implemented could not be detailed here (see [10] for more details).…”

“…The .integrate() action ensures such behaviour (cf. [10]). But alice had also the possibility to adopt different behaviours by using other combination actions (e.g.…”

“…autonomous individuals with collective objectives) that make trust decisions more complex. It motivates the need for adequate trust models that address three essential requirements [10], that can be summarized as follows:…”