A Comparative Analysis of Trust Models for Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract—Multi-agent systems can break interactions in distributed and heterogeneous environments, therefore, trust models play a critical role in determining how interactions take place between multiple agents. This paper compared and analyzed some recent trust models based on five important components: architecture, dimension, initial trust, reputation, and risk. Overall results indicate risk and initial trust to be the weakest components, whereas dimension, reputation and architecture are the strong components of the existing trust models. This analysis helps to introduce the standard components of trust and reputation models for e-commerce multi-agent systems, and to identify the weakness and strengths of the models based on these standard components.

Index Terms—Architecture, dimension, initial trust, reputation, risk.

The authors are with the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (e-mail: vimala.balakrishnan@um.edu.my, elh.majd@gmail.com).

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Cite: Vimala Balakrishnan and Elham Majd, "A Comparative Analysis of Trust Models for Multi-Agent Systems," Lecture Notes on Software Engineering vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 183-185, 2013.