Quantitative trust management with QoS-aware service selection

Abstract

As the number of services available on the web increases, discovering which services are trustworthy becomes vital. Given the black-box nature of services, selecting a trustworthy service that best fits users' requirements is critical. Once a set of services fulfilling users' functional requirements has been found, which one a user chooses depends mostly on the Quality of Services (QoS), particularly security, trust and reputation. This paper proposes a trust management model to support service discovery and selection based on QoS. We define a quantitative trust-evaluation method for dynamic service discovery and selection and show experimental results. The proposed model allows service consumers to get the most trustworthy services possible. Our mechanism uses consumers' feedback to describe how trustworthy they have found services and service providers to be. Choosing services using a quantitative measurement rather than their intuition will allow consumers to select a highly reliable service that meets their quality and technical requirements.