Representation of Trust and Reputation in Self-Managed Computing Systems

Trust is becoming an increasingly important issue in large-scale distributed systems. Especially self-managed systems from the Autonomic and Organic Computing domains consisting of several cooperating entities have to rely on an automated estimation how reliable and trustworthy potential cooperation partners are. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept to represent trust among those entities. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our novel solution has the advantage of being utilisable in controlled self-management scenarios - especially in the context of normative control. For evaluation purposes, we use the Trusted Desktop Grid as application scenario. Within this evaluation, we show that the novel mechanism outperforms existing concepts in terms of the expected trust values. Additionally, we show that storage and update routines can be implemented efficiently.