FIRE: an integrated trust and reputation model for open multi-agent systems

Abstract

Trust and reputation are central to effective interactions in open multi-agent systems in which agents, that are owned by a variety of stakeholders, can enter and leave the system at any time.This openness means existing trust and reputation models cannot readily be used.To this end, we present FIRE, a trust and reputation model that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive assessment of an agent's likely performance.Specifically, FIRE incorporates interaction trust, role-based trust, witness reputation, and certified reputation to provide a trust metric in virtually all circumstances.FIRE is empirically benchmarked and is shown to help agents effectively select appropriate interaction partners.