A Context-Aware Trust Model for Service-Oriented Multi-Agent Systems

Service-oriented systems offer the potential for minimizing the development time of business applications within an enterprise while promoting collaborative joint ventures among enterprisers distributed geographically. Service-oriented applications assembled from services obtained from different vendors, sometimes anonymous, should be trustworthy. In this paper we investigate context-aware multi-agent systems (MAS) which can dynamically form coalitions of trusted partners as an effective mechanism to act on behalf of service requestors, find services requested by them, determine trusted services, and provide services to the requestors without violating the privacy of the partners involved in such transactions. The MAS is open with respect to external agents requesting and receiving services, but closed with respect to other activities initiated by external agents. The agents in MAS may have different trust models. We explain how trust models of different agents should be composed into a web of trust for trusted transactions in MAS.