The Most Trustworthy Service Provider in E-Commerce Multi-Agent Environments

This paper aims to enhance trust in e-commerce multi-agent environments by presenting a trust model to select the most trustworthy service provider, named 2RC, based on computing Reputation, Risk, and Conflict of service provider agents. To propose a computational model,the most representative trust models in e-commerce agent systems were analyzed. These models focus on different factors for evaluating the trustworthiness of agents. According to this analysis, 2RC model computes three vital factors as; reputation of provider agents, risk of interaction with provider agents, and the conflict in previous behavior of provider agents. Then 2RC presents a method for selecting the most trustworthy service provider agent by using TOPSIS method. The experimental results in defense of the proposed model are provided and the performance of 2RC is compared with other existing trust models. The experimental results indicate that the performance of 2RC is significantly better than other existing models. Thereby 2RC is capable of selecting the trustworthy service provider agent more appropriately that other trust models. The 2RC is beneficial to enhance the safety of online transaction in e-commerce-multi-agent environments