Trust and Reputation Models for Multiagent Systems

Abstract

Finding reliable partners to interact with in open environments is a challenging task for software agents, and trust and reputation mechanisms are used to handle this issue. From this viewpoint, we can observe the growing body of research on this subject, which indicates that these mechanisms can be considered key elements to design multiagent systems (MASs). Based on that, this article presents an extensive but not exhaustive review about the most significant trust and reputation models published over the past two decades, and hundreds of models were analyzed using two perspectives. The first one is a combination of trust dimensions and principles proposed by some relevant authors in the field, and the models are discussed using an MAS perspective. The second one is the discussion of these dimensions taking into account some types of interaction found in MASs, such as coalition, argumentation, negotiation, and recommendation. By these analyses, we aim to find significant relations between trust dimensions and types of interaction so it would be possible to construct MASs using the most relevant dimensions according to the types of interaction, which may help developers in the design of MASs.