Trust between Cooperating Technical Systems

Researchers from social sciences and economics consider trust a requirement for successful cooperation between people. It helps to judge the risk in situations, in which a person has the choice to rely on another one. In the future, technical systems will face similar situations. Assume, for example, self-organised robots, which reload some goods at a large logistics centre together. For this, they will need a mechanism like trust.

This book gives the reader tools to understand trust and to introduce a trust mechnism into own applications. The tools include generic requirements for own trust mechanisms and the Enfident Model - a conceptual, implementation-independent model of trust. These theoretical tools are complemented with state-of-the-art algorithms from statistical relational learning. Finally, as an example, all this is applied to cooperating cognitive vehicles. As trust is a social phenomenon, this evaluation features a virtual society of vehicles, which cooperate in a vehicular network. It shows that the postulated requirements and the Enfident Model lead to intuitive and consistent results.



Walter Bamberger received his Dr-Ing from the Technische Universität München. He is interested in interdisciplinary research on the fields of engineering and social sciences. Especially he is facinated by trust-based cooperation. He investigates trust between cognitive systems in alignment with trust between humans: Trust helps to handle the uncertainty in the interaction between those systems. With this idea, he raised a seedling fund in the cluster of excellence Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys).