Effective Use of Organisational Abstractions for Confidence Models

Abstract

Trust and reputation mechanisms are commonly used to infer expectations of future behaviour from past interactions. They are of particular relevance when agents have to choose appropriate counterparts for their interactions as it may also happen within virtual organisations. However, when agents join an organisation, information about past interactions is usually not available. The use of organisational structures can tackle this problem and can improve the efficiency of trust and reputation mechanisms by endowing agents with some extra information to choose the best agents to interact with. In this context, we present how certain structural properties of virtual organisations can be used to build an efficient trust model in a local way. Furthermore, we introduce a testbed (TOAST) that allows to analyse different trust and reputation models in situations where agents act within virtual organisations. We experimentally evaluate our approach and show its validity.