Trust-Based Facilitator for Agent-Based E-Commerce

In this paper, we propose a facilitator which finds capable and trustworthy partners on behalf of client users, which helps users form and maintain e-partnerships for electronic commerce and electronic collaboration. Unlike existing capability-based facilitators or matchmakers, the facilitator collects and maintains private “wordof-mouth” trust information as well as capabilities from each user and uses the information for personalized trustbased facilitation for each user, which is done through the facilitation protocols and trust propagation mechanism. Compared to other existing trust mechanisms, the characteristics of trust which this facilitator handles are personalized-collaborative-subjective-qualitative-private. The facilitator was implemented as a JATLite multi-agent system and tested in the area of construction supply-chain coordination.