A Trust Management System for Multi-agent System in Smart Grids using Blockchain Technology

In a multi-agent system (MAS), the trust of each agent has become hot research issues in the smart grids. The traditional trust systems that use access control and cryptography are not sufficient to handle the dynamic behavior of agents. Also, they are inefficient to solve the computational overhead of the cryptographic primitives. Based on these limitations, this paper proposes a blockchain-based trust management system for MAS. The proposed system consists of two layers: a lower layer that enables an agent to perform direct and indirect trust evaluations of other agents during interactions. Multi-source feedback from the interactions among different aggregators is feed to the blockchain. The upper layer is used to perform trust credibility of agents based on trust distortion, consistency and reliability. The credibility evaluation is used to determine the dynamic behavior of agents and also detect dishonest agents in the system. Trust model and security analysis of the proposed system are provided. Moreover, simulation results evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed trust system while the system is secure against bad-mouthing and on-off attacks.