Trust Communities: An Open, Self-Organised Social Infrastructure of Autonomous Agents

Abstract

Future technical systems will be increasingly characterised by openness and heterogeneity of participating elements. Based on exemplary application scenarios such as Desktop Computing Grids, Smart Power Grids, and Networked Camera Systems, this chapter develops a solution perspective to handle anomalies, disturbances, and malicious behaviour by making use of trust and reliability measures in self-organised systems. The overall goal is to increase the robustness of open distributed systems with low overhead. Therefore, a novel self-organised multi-agent organisation-the Trust Community-is introduced in two variants: as implicit and as explicit self-structuring society of autonomous agents. For the explicit variant, a life-cycle and management routines are described. For evaluation purposes, we simulate a Trusted Desktop Computing Grid and introduce different types of stereo-type agent behaviour, ranging from altruistic to egoistic and to cunning behaviour. In order to support efficiency and stabilise the process, we show the benefits of explicit Trust Communities, which results in significantly lower overhead and more reliable relations among agents compared to other forms of agent societies.

Partitioned integration and coordination via the self-organising coordination regions pattern

“…Specifically, as short-term future work, we would like to investigate variants of the pattern, improve its analysis by a control-theoretical perspective, and possibly follow research directions along the SISSY challenge, for instance those related to learning and computational trust (e.g., on the line explored in [75,76]).…”

“…The choice is driven by the will to minimise the cost for the leader election process, which is likely to be less expensive if the elected leaders remain the same over time, hence promoting an upstream selection of candidates less likely to leave the system. Trust could also be used to rate and therefore include/exclude nodes from the candidate set based on observed activity [75], reifing a notion of trust community [76], whose deeper investigation is left as an interesting future work. The election process can be part of the system bootstrap process or be dynamically reconsidered, continuously or after a delay.…”

The Vision of Self-Management in Cognitive Organic Power Distribution Systems

“…Relation adaptation typically covers two intertwined questions for the autonomous subsystems [33]: With whom to modify relations and how to modify them. Existing approaches for partner selection are based on the agents' interaction history [34], sometimes combined with an uncertainty or trust measure [35]. In contrast, the term 'organisational design' refers to the question of how society or group members interact and relate with one another [36].…”

Self-improving system integration: Mastering continuous change

“…In the context of computational trust, a concept for establishing explicit communities of mutually trusted subsystems and isolating malicious or faulty subsystems has been presented [95]. Based on this initial concept, several extensions have been investigated: Mechanisms for measuring trust and reputation [96], advanced attacks on such trust communities and corresponding countermeasures [97], accusation-based strategies to identify misbehaving subsystems and to establish forgiveness solutions [98], and robust self-monitoring mechanisms at run-time [99].…”