Multi-Criteria Trust Establishment for Multi-Agent Systems Based on Fuzzy Logic

Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are increasingly accepted for modeling virtual complex distributed systems, such as virtual societies and smart grids, due to agents’ autonomy, flexibility and pro-activity. As autonomous, goal-driven agents can mislead others intentionally or accidentally by inaccurately reporting their competencies and abilities, the use of trust modeling deemed essential for successful interactions in MASs. The concept of trust is complex, multidimensional and includes more than just evaluating how honest interaction partners are. This study describes an explicit, multi-criteria, trust establishment model based on fuzzy logic to guide trustees in MASs to improve their level of trust as perceived by the trustor by tuning up their behaviors to attract more interactions with potential partners. When trustors are willing to provide feedback for interactions in the form of a single satisfaction value per multi-criterion interaction, the model attempts to predict the necessary improvement per criterion. We evaluated the performance of the proposed model using simulation. The results indicate that the model can help trustees achieve higher trust levels and get better chances to be selected as partners for interactions in MASs when trustors select trustees based on trust.