Fuzzy approach for the evaluation of trust and reputation of services

A service-oriented environment has special characteristics that distinguishes it from other computing environments: (i) the environment is dynamic; (ii) the number of service providers is unbounded; (iii) services are owned by various stakeholders with different aims and objectives; (iv) there is no central authority that can control all the service providers and consumers; (v) service providers and consumers are self-interested. Given these special characteristics, the evaluation of trust and reputation is very important in such an open, dynamic and distributed environment. Therefore, a fuzzy-based trust and reputation approach using three trust sources was developed. Simulating the real world in which deception happens, an evaluation is performed showing the usefulness and robustness of the fuzzy approach by a comparison with a weighted approach.