Secure and Efficient Group Decision-Making with Blockchain-Based Consensus and Trust Management

Hossein Hassani, Roozbeh Razavi-Far, Mehrdad Saif, Enrique Herrera-Viedma

Abstract: Trust-building is of paramount importance for managing and improving consensus in group decision-making (GDM). This mechanism usually involves a trust propagation process for estimating the level of trust among decision-makers (DMs). However, this process is computationally expensive and hinders the speed of consensus reaching. To address this issue, this work proposes a novel trust-building mechanism that does not rely on the trust propagation process to quantify DMs' level of trust. Instead, it makes use of Blockchain technology to facilitate communication between the moderator and the group of DMs. This novel trust-building mechanism does not rely on trust propagation, which makes it computationally efficient for building trust among DMs while also providing a secure and efficient communication protocol to accelerate the consensus-reaching process. The proposed GDM model is illustrated through an example, and the sensitivity of the model to various assumptions is analyzed, demonstrating the practical applicability of this approach.