Erriquez, Elisabetta
Computational models of trust.
Doctor of Philosophy thesis, University of Liverpool.
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Abstract
Trust and reputation are key issues in the multi-agent systems domain. As in human societies, software agents must interact with other agents in settings where there is the possibility that they can be exploited. This suggests the need for theoretical and computational models of trust and reputation that can be used by software agents, and accordingly, much research has investigated this issue. The first part of this thesis investigates the conjecture that agents who make decisions in scenarios where trust is important can benefit from the use of a social structure, representing the social relationships that exist between agents. To this end, we present techniques that can be used by agents to initially build and then progressively update such a structure in the light of experience. As the agents interact with other agents they gather information about interactions and relationships in order to build the network of agents and to better understand their social environment. We also show empirical evidence that a trust model enhanced with a social structure representation, used to gather additional information to select trustworthy agents for an agent’s interactions, can improve the trust model’s performance. In the second part of this thesis, we concentrate on the context of coalition formation. Coalition stability is a crucial issue. Stability is the motivation of an agent’s refusal to break from the original coalition and form a new one. Lack of trust in some of the coalition members could induce one agent to leave the coalition. Therefore we address the current model’s limitation by introducing an abstract framework that allows agents to form distrust-free coalitions. Moreover we present measures to evaluate the trustworthiness of the agent with respect to the whole society or to a particular coalition. We also describe a way to combine the trust and distrust relationships to form coalitions which are still distrust-free.
Item Type: | Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy) |
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Additional Information: | Date: 2012-03 (completed) |
Divisions: | Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
Date Deposited: | 07 Jan 2013 10:04 |
Last Modified: | 16 Dec 2022 04:36 |
DOI: | 10.17638/00007433 |
Supervisors: |
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URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/7433 |