The Contract Net Protocol with Trust Model in Open Multi-Agent System

As one of the most important coordination mechanisms, contract net protocol (CNP) has been extensively studied in many fields, where many other techniques are also used to improve the decision quality. CNP suffers from multiple disadvantageous limitations in the open environment of MAS, so the trust model, a fundamental issue in large-scale open distributed systems, is introduced into CNP in this paper. Based on reviewing CNP and the trust model of the initiator side, we add the trust model, with direct trust and recommendation-based trust components, into CNP process. Experimental results show that the initiators with trust model almost steadily get the best participants no matter the environment is honest-dominated or dishonest-dominated. Even in the dishonest-dominated environment, this approach gets better results and is proved valuable.