PBTrust: A Priority-Based Trust Model for Service Selection in General Service-Oriented Environments

How to choose the best service provider (agent), which a service consumer can trust in terms of the quality and success rate of the service in an open and dynamic environment, is a challenging problem in many service-oriented applications such as Internet-based grid systems, e-trading systems, as well as service-oriented computing systems. This paper presents a Priority-Based Trust (PBTrust) model for service selection in general service-oriented environments. The PBTrust is robust and novel from several perspectives. (1) The reputation of a service provider is derived from referees who are third parties and had interactions with the provider in a rich context format, including attributes of the service, the priority distribution on attributes and a rating value for each attribute from a third party, (2) The concept of 'Similarity' is introduced to measure the difference in terms of distributions of priorities on attributes between requested service and a refereed service in order to precisely predict the performance of a potential provider on the requested service, (3) The concept of general performance of a service provider on a service in history is also introduced to improve the success rate on the requested service. The experimental results can prove that PBtrust has a better performance than that of the CR model in a service-oriented environment.