Metrics for Computing Trust in a Multi-Agent Environment

Abstract: One of the risks involved in multi agent community is in the identification of trustworthy agent partners for transaction. In this paper we aim to describe a trust model for measuring trust in the interacting agents. The trust metric model works on the basis of the parameters that we have identified. The model primarily analyses trust value on the basis of the agents reputation, as provided by the agent itself, and the agents aggregate rating as provided by the witness agents. The final computation of the trust value is given by a weighted average of these two components. While computing the aggregate rating, a weight based method has been adopted to discount the contribution of possibly unfair ratings by the witness agents.