System Modeling and Trust Evaluation of Distributed Systems

Nowadays, digital systems are connected through complex architectures. These systems involve persons, physical and digital resources such that we can consider that a system consists of elements from two worlds, the social world and the digital world, and their relations. Users perform activities like chatting, buying, sharing data, etc. Evaluating and choosing appropriate systems involve aspects like functionality, performance, QoS, ease of use, or price. Recently, trust appeared as another key factor for such an evaluation. In this context, we raise two issues, (i) how to formalize the entities that compose a system and their relations for a particular activity? and (ii) how to evaluate trust in a system for this activity? This work proposes answers to both questions. On the one hand, we propose SOCIOPATH, a metamodel based on first order logic, that allows to model a system considering entities of the social and digital worlds and their relations. On the other hand, we propose two approaches to evaluate trust in systems, namely, SOCIOTRUST and SUBJECTIVETRUST. The former is based on probability theory to evaluate users’ trust in systems for a given activity. The latter is based on subjective logic to take into account uncertainty in trust values.