Trust-based decision making in dynamic environments

Recent developments in information technology shift the computing paradigm towards greater dynamism and unpredictability, which raises new challenges. In dynamic computing environments, the relationship between transacting entities is not pre-determined, and these entities may not necessarily have previous knowledge or experience of each other. In such a context, the potential for these transacting entities to find a service peer or provider is greatly increased, but this also brings uncertainty, i.e., how does the entity know which is the best candidate among a vast number of peers. Based on our previous research work, MobiPass. This paper proposes a technique for establishing trusted interaction by certifying the information passed between transacting entities, calculating the trust value for each entity in a global perspective, then incorporating the computed trust value with other certified information by using Multi Criteria Decision Making on top of the MobiPass framework. In this way, transacting entities are empowered to select the most suitable transacting partners through trusted interaction in dynamic environments. © 2010 IEEE