ServiceTrust: Supporting Reputation-Oriented Service Selection

Qiang He, Jun Yan, Hai Jin, Yun Yang

Abstract: Service transactions, although attached with service level agreements, may still fail due to various reasons, intentionally or accidentally, in the open and volatile service-oriented environment. In service selection, consumers often need to estimate the trustworthiness of the provider with limited prior experience and knowledge about them. Moreover, the service-oriented environment exposes consumers to unique threats including malicious reputation manipulation and quality-of-service (QoS) abuse. This paper presents ServiceTrust – a novel trust management approach to support reputation-oriented service selection by quantifying and comparing the trustworthiness of providers based on their historic performance over service transactions. ServiceTrust combines a consumer’s and other consumers’ personal trust to estimate the provider’s trust value. Our experimental results demonstrate that ServiceTrust can significantly increase the success rate of service transactions and is effective in resisting malicious reputation manipulation and QoS abuse.