Trust-based service provider selection in service-oriented environments

Nowadays, agent-based service-oriented systems have been widely applied in many complex domains such as e-markets, grid systems, e-governments and service-oriented software systems, cross Internet and organizations. In this kind of service-oriented multi-agent systems, service providers (agents) and service consumers (agents) are autonomous entities and can enter and leave environments freely. How to select the most suitable service providers according to the requested services from consumers in such an open and dynamic environment is a very challenging issue. The objectives of this paper include (1) studying the challenging issues of trust-based service provider selection, (2) investigating the current approaches of trust models for service provider selection in general service-oriented multi-agent systems, and (3) developing new solutions for service provider selection to overcome several limitations in current approaches.