GTrust: An innovated trust model for group services selection in web-based service-oriented environments

In past twenty years, the multi-agent technology has been widely employed for the development of web-based systems. Currently, agent-based service-oriented applications have been widely applied in many complex domains such as web-based e-markets, web-based grid computing, e-government and service-oriented software systems, cross Internet and organizations. In this kind of service-oriented systems, service provider (agents) and service consumer (agents) are autonomous entities and can enter and leave the environment freely. How to select the most suitable service providers according to the requested services from consumers in such an open environment is a very challenge issue. In this paper, we propose an innovated trust model-the GTrust model for group services selection in a general service-oriented environment. In our model, the trust evaluation for a group service is based on (1) the coverage rate of the requested functionalities from a group service, (2) the dependency relationships among individual services in a group, (3) reference reports from third parties for each provider of individual services in a group and (4) the similarity measurement about to what extent the reference reports can reflect the new service request in terms of priority distributions on attributes of the service. The experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the GTrust model in terms of satisfaction degree in group service selections.