Modelling Self-Led Trust Value Management in Grid and Service Oriented Infrastructures: A Graph Theoretic Social Network Mediated Approach

Current developments in grid and service oriented technologies involve fluid and dynamic, ad hoc based interactions between delegates, which in turn, serves to challenge conventional centralised structured trust and security assurance approaches. Delegates ranging from individuals to large-scale VO (Virtual Organisations) require the establishment of trust across all parties as a prerequisite for trusted and meaningful e-collaboration. In this paper, a notable obstacle, namely how such delegates (modelled as nodes) operating within complex collaborative environment spaces can best evaluate in context to optimally and dynamically select the most trustworthy ad hoc based resource/service for e-consumption. A number of aggregated service case scenarios are herein employed in order to consider the manner in which virtual consumers and provider ad hoc based communities converge. In this paper, the authors take the view that the use of graph-theoretic modelling naturally leads to a self-led trust management decision based approach in which delegates are continuously informed of relevant up-to-date trust levels. This will lead to an increased confidence level, which trustful service delegation can occur. The key notion is of a self-led trust model that is suited to an inherently low latency, decentralised trust security paradigm.