Designing Robust Trust Establishment Models with a Generalized Architecture and a Cluster-Based Improvement Methodology

Abstract

In Multi-Agent Systems consisting of intelligent agents that interact with one another, where the agents are software entities which represent individuals or organizations, it is important for the agents to be equipped with trust evaluation models which allow the agents to evaluate the trustworthiness of other agents when dishonest agents may exist in an environment. Evaluating trust allows agents to find and select reliable interaction partners in an environment. Thus, the cost incurred by an agent for establishing trust in an environment can be compensated if this improved trustworthiness leads to an increased number of profitable transactions. Therefore, it is equally important to design effective trust establishment models which allow an agent to generate trust among other agents in an environment. This thesis focuses on providing improvements to the designs of existing and future trust establishment models. Robust trust establishment models, such as the Integrated Trust Establishment (ITE) model, may use dynamically updated variables to adjust the predicted importance of a task’s criteria for specific trustors. This thesis proposes a cluster-based approach to update these dynamic variables more accurately to achieve improved trust establishment performance. Rather than sharing these dynamic variables globally, a model can learn to adjust a trustee’s behaviours more accurately to trustor needs by storing the variables locally for each trustor and by updating groups of these variables together by using data from a corresponding group of similar trustors. This work also presents a generalized trust establishment model architecture to help models be easier to design and be more modular. This architecture introduces a new transaction-level preprocessing module to help improve a model’s performance and defines a trustor-level postprocessing module to encapsulate the designs of existing models. The preprocessing module allows a model to fine-tune the resources that an agent will provide during a transaction before it occurs. A trust establishment model, named the Generalized Trust Establishment Model (GTEM), is designed to showcase the benefits of using the preprocessing module. Simulated comparisons between a cluster-based version of ITE and ITE indicate that the cluster-based approach helps trustees better meet the expectations of trustors while minimizing the cost of doing so. Comparing GTEM to itself without the preprocessing module and to two existing models in simulated tests exhibits that the preprocessing module improves a trustee’s trustworthiness and better meets trustor desires at a faster rate than without using preprocessing.