Reputation-Based Trust Assessment of Transacting Service Components

We witness a paradigm shift where entities such as software applications, people, businesses and service providers increasingly interact in virtual rather than physical environments, such as social media, social commerce, and the metaverses. A key issue that emerges in such environments is how one entity can trust another. Here, the concept of trust is considered as a meta-requirement, that is, the level of belief a service requestor has that a service provider will provide the service in a way that meets the requestor’s expectations. We refer to the service offering entities as service providers (SPs) and the service requesting entities as service clients (SCs). In this paper, we propose a technique that allows for evaluating trust and assigning reputation to various service providers by considering first their ability to fulfill their clients’ expectations or policies, and second the reputation other service clients have, when acting as recommenders for the aforementioned service providers. In this work, service clients and service providers are considered as virtual entities that coordinate with each other, and may include physical users, avatars, micro-services, software agents, smart contracts or any other distributed inter-networked resource, without making any assumptions as to what a service client or a service provider entity is as long as it participates in an interaction.