Agent Based Trust Management Framework in Distributed E-Business Environment

In e-business environment, Trust Management is an important factor that is necessary for all transactions. The basic e-business requirements like non-reputation of both trustee and of trustier are found to be problem arising due to lack of trust information. Many environments use relatively simple mechanism to calculate trust, for example, e-bay is a typical example for reputation based system built on centralized model of trust. Several frameworks have been designed by researchers based on reputation models, but all these mechanisms failed in preventing users from producing false information while making a reputation. Also sufficient information regarding the new users who have just started doing business online is not available.

To overcome the drawbacks of the existing system, a new trust management framework is proposed in this paper for a distributed e-business environment. The model offers the merits of previous trust management systems based on Trusted third parties namely Policy-based and Reputation based models. It also ensures trustworthy business transactions between the business entities and provides a more appropriate trust rating value calculated on the basis of mathematical model taking into account the feedback of peers and direct experience and access policy. The implementation using Agents is found to be more efficient with respect to time and trust calculation when compared to the model which works under non Agent environment.