A multi-criteria decision-making formulation of trust using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

Abstract

Trust models have widespread applications in different areas. In this paper, we formulate trust as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. By applying this new formulation, one can treat the process of trust establishment as a decision-making process based on some set of trustworthiness criteria. By looking at trust as a whole, we may miss some important factors. Only by dividing this concept into its building blocks and weighting those building blocks based on the proposed perception of importance in a context and toward a specific goal, we can achieve a better decision. As a structural way for making trust decisions, the proposed method uses fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Fuzzy AHP provides both the advantages of fuzziness, which is compatible with the uncertain, vague, and subjective nature of trust and AHP as a systematic approach to make decisions in complex MCDM problems. In order to aggregate the evaluations of each recommender about every trustee candidate, the Sugeno fuzzy integral is used to build the final trust score. At last, the method calculates the final recommendation score based on the trustor’s subjective belief. We present an illustrative example plus an empirical experiment in the context of Web service selection to demonstrate the application of the proposed formulation of trust and the evaluation of trust scores.