A trust model for new member in multiagent system

Abstract

Computational trust has been modelled for supporting agents in selecting partners in open and distributed multiagent systems. Most of current models are based on the experience of transactions in the past with a given partner or on reputation of a partner from other agents in the system. However, these models could not deal with the case, a new coming agent has no experience with partners or could not obtain the information about the reputation of partners. Then, agents in the system and the new one may encounter an obstacle in estimating trust on corresponding partners. In this paper, we introduce a novel mechanism for computing trust of a new coming partner by means of some similarity in a profile of the new agent and the ones of well-known agents. Experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed model in the scenario of an e-commerce environment. Our experimental results indicate that the combination model with similarity trust significantly improves computational results, in some particular situation, compared with some recent trust models.