The evaluation of Qualitative Assessment Dynamics (QAD) methodology for managing trust in pervasive computing environments

Environment of pervasive computing fosters interactions between people and devices. The effective collaboration among existing entities cannot exist without trust. For this reason, computationally supported trust management systems are necessary part of such environment. In this paper, we evaluated the Qualitative Assessment Dynamics (QAD) methodology for managing trust, based on simulations. We proposed different scenarios with service requesters and service providers, where some of them provide unsatisfying services. Further, we performed two set of experiments. The first set of experiments demonstrates the effect of introducing trust management system into environment. QAD methodology defines different operators that model an agent´s behavior. The second set of experiments shows the effects of QAD operators. We analyzed the behavior of agents modeled with different operators and compared the decisions they made.