Using simulation to explore trust lifecycle issues

Simulation is a vital tool in research methods for investigating lifecycle issues in critical application areas, such as scenarios involving trust. Our trust model is premised on the belief that the ability to form and evolve explicit values for trust in other principals in an interaction allows autonomous computational entities to make better decisions in situations where only partial information is available. In our model we view the trust lifecycle as a three stage process: trust formation, trust evolution and trust exploitation. Our framework is based on model and will allow us to run a series of experiments, which simulate principals collaborating over time for a number of applications. For its design we investigated three trust-based application scenarios namely: agent-based file sharing, dynamic routing in ad hoc networks and agent-based meeting organiser. These applications capture a variety of trust relationships. In this paper, we start with a presentation of our initial motivation. We continue with an examination of the characteristics of our trust lifecycle model and an overview of our application scenarios. We examine in more detail the agent-based file sharing application scenario and conclude with a discussion of our experiences and remaining open issues.