A decentralized calendar system featuring sharing, trusting and negotiating

Abstract

This article presents a decentralized calendar system benefiting from the use of computational trust. In our system, each user is represented by an agent in charge of the scheduling of events, either tasks or meetings. Each event is characterized by two attributes: importance and urgency. These notions are subjective: each agent has its own priorities and its own view of what is important and urgent. Timetables can be shared with other agents according to the groups of the agents, thus facilitating the scheduling of a meeting within a group. Nevertheless, timetables do not have to be shared. So we introduce trust to support this absence of information. These mechanisms use a generic trust model permitting the calculation of trust from several sources. We stress on the importance of the different sources for the emergence of trust groups. When trust is not given between all participants in a meeting, negotiation is used to find a possible date. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.