Dynamic Verification of Trust in Distributed Open Systems

Nardine Osman, David Robertson

In open and distributed systems, agents must engage in interactions of which they have no previous experience. Deontic models are widely used to describe aspects of permission, obligation, and trust anticipated by such agents, but no practical mechanism has been developed for testing deontic trust specifications against models of multi-agent interactions. This paper describes a way of doing this; an implementation of it via model checking; and some preliminary results on a realistic example.