Multi-criteria trust establishment for Internet of Agents in smart grids

The Internet of Agents (IoA) is an emerging field of research that aims to combine the advantages of multi-agent systems and Internet of Things (IoT), by adding autonomy and smartness to, traditionally, dummy things used in IoT. Multi-agent systems can be used to model distributed systems of smart grids, such as smart grid operations, power system control, electricity market, and monitoring and diagnostic. Trust management can be considered a key component for successful interactions between autonomous agents in IoA, especially when agents cannot assure that potential interactions' partners share the same core beliefs, or make accurate statements regarding their competencies and abilities. When interactions are based on trust, trust establishment mechanisms can be used to direct trustees, instead of trustors, to build a higher level of trust and have a greater impact on the results of interactions. This paper presents a trust establishment model that uses a multi-criteria (multidimensional) approach to help trustees in IoA environment to adjust their behaviors to improve their perceived trustworthiness, to attract more interactions with trustors. It calculates the necessary improvement per criterion when only a single aggregated satisfaction value is provided per interaction, where the model attempts to predicted both the appropriate value per criteria and its importance. The proposed model is evaluated through simulation, and results indicate that trustees empowered with the proposed model have higher levels of trust and better chances to be selected as interaction partners when such selection is based on trust. © 2017 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.