Design and Simulation of Trust Management Techniques for a Coalition Data Sharing Environment

Effective communication among agents in large teams is crucial because the members share a common goal but only have partial views of the environment. Information sharing is difficult in a large team because, a team member may have a piece of valuable information but not know who needs the information, since it is infeasible to know what each other agent is doing. Information sharing is a main part of any system or organization. The information sharing needs to be foolproof. Only the legitimate receiver should be able to get hold of the information. This paper mainly deals with intelligent software agents for information sharing with confidentiality and trust. It clearly defines an intelligent software agent, background of information sharing in intelligent agents and the trust in the agents. Some part of the information needs confidentiality. The information that is shared requires security policy enforced based on the domain of the information and trust level of individual agent. This paper also provides the results of a multi-agent simulation for sharing information. It also implements trust calculation based on the quality of information provided by the peer agents in the simulation