Composite Trust in Networked Multi-Agent Systems

Trust plays a crucial role in the analysis, synthesis and operation of the integrated system consisting of social-cognitive, information and communication networks. Multi-agent systems and associated coalition operations, which involve two or more organizations, further augment the diversity and complexity of network interactions. Trust and its derivative notions affect dramatically the networked coalition operations. A substantial part of the research challenge has to do with the multitude of meanings, interpretations, symbolisms and mathematical models used to represent and analyze trust. In this paper, we introduce value directed graphs with weighted nodes as our model for composite trust. We extend the value directed graph with weighted nodes composite trust model to include not only numerical weights, but also constraints. We show that the semiring-based constraint satisfaction problem (SCSPs) framework can serve as the unified model to investigate trust relation establishment.