An adaptive and Socially-Compliant Trust Management System for virtual communities

Abstract

Virtual communities (VCs) are open socio-technical structures wherein autonomous entities (i.e. agents) with common objectives join together to mutually satisfy their goals. The success of these communities relies on collaboration and resource sharing principals, making trust a critical issue for each member. Such environments motivate the need for more flexible trust models wherein both individual (i.e. user-centred) and collective (i.e. community-centred) trust requirements are considered in the decision making-process. This paper reports our on-going efforts in that perspective and presents our Adaptive and Socially-Compliant Trust Management System (ASC-TMS). Policies are used, in the system, to specify individual and collective trust requirements, while meta-policies enable agents to dynamically adapt their policies and make socially-compliant trust decisions through automatic combination of individual and collective policies. © 2012 ACM.