A Reputation-Based Trust Model for Agent Societies

Trust and security issues are prevalent in agent societies, where agents are autonomously owned and operated in a networked environment. Nowadays, trust and reputation management is a promising approach to manage them. However, many reputation models su.ered from a major drawback – there is no mechanism to discourage agents from lying information when making a recommendation. Although some works do take into account of this issue, they usually do not penalize an agent for making poor referrals. Worse, some systems actually judge an agent’s referral reputation based on its service reputation. In situations where this is unacceptable, we need to have a mechanism where agents are not only discouraged from making poor referrals, but are also penalized when doing so. Towards this, we propose a reputation-based trust model that considers an agent’s referral reputation as a separate entity within the broader sense of an agent’s reputation. Our objective is not to replace any existing reputation mechanisms, but rather to complement and extend them.

Authors and Affiliations

1. School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Victoria, 3217, Australia

   Yuk-Hei Lam, Zili Zhang & Kok-Leong Ong

2. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Southwest China Normal University, Chongqing, 400715, China

   Zili Zhang

Editors and Affiliations

1. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems, and Australian ACS National Committee for Artificial Intelligence, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

   Chengqi Zhang

2. Department of Computer Science, Auckland University of Technology, 1020, Auckland, New Zealand

   Hans W. Guesgen

3. Artificial Intelligence Technology Centre, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

   Wai-Kiang Yeap

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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