Trust Based Prioritization of Quality Attributes

Punam Bedi and Vibha Gaur

Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi, India

 Abstract:  Advances in network and distributed technology has revolutionized the advent of multi-agent systems. Nowadays, agent technology has been applied in revising and restructuring the complex software systems. Trust plays a key role in multi-agent systems as agents will be representing or acting on behalf of users or owners with different goals and motivations. Tasks are delegated to software agents that achieve their common goals based on interaction among themselves. Current trust models focus on the limited aspect of stakeholders trust in multi-agent systems; for example security issues of the entities involved in system while ignoring the other issues such as knowledgeability, usability, persistency, accessibility, performance, collaboration, realism and integrity.  This paper identifies the quality attributes of Multi-agent system, which foster the stakeholders trust in the system and hence establishes the multifaceted definition of trust in MAS. Building trust from the quality attributes would encourage the developer to induce these quality attributes in the MAS development life cycle and produce a system whose foundation will be the stakeholders trust. This paper also prioritizes the quality attributes of MAS in order of their impact on stakeholders’ trust. 

Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFS), trust, quality attribute. 

Received September 8, 2006; accepted June 16, 2007