A reputation-based trust evaluation model in group decision-making framework

Abstract

In group decision-making (GDM) problems, experts need to communicate and adjust their opinions in order to achieve consensus on the final decision-making output. Since experts may have conflicting opinions, trust can be critical and an important reference to use in the decision-making process when some experts are required to modify opinions. Recently, decision-making models based on trust and reputation have been investigated intensively. However, these research works usually rely on the constructed social trust network and honesty and fairness of the trust ratings from experts are taken for granted. The objective of this study is to develop a reputation-based trust model for GDM framework to obtain the trust relationship among experts from their direct interaction and word of mouth. First, the paper defines a trust credibility measure to filter out malicious experts before trust assessment, and designs direct trust feedback based on the interaction quality. Then, based on this direct trust feedback, the global reputation model is proposed according to the synthetical performance of received and provided trust feedback, which encourages long-term good behaviour and guarantees trustworthy communications and interactions. The reputation-based trust and direct trust feedback together build trust relationship among experts. Finally, a simulation experimental analysis of the proposed trust and reputation models is carried out to verify their effectiveness in trust and reputation establishment among the experts, even under the presence of malicious ones.