Towards Trust in Desktop Grid Systems

The Organic Computing (OC) Initiative deals with technical systems, that consist of a large number of distributed and highly interconnected subsystems. In such systems, it is impossible for a designer to foresee all possible system configurations and to plan an appropriate system behaviour completely at design time. The aim is to endow such technical systems with the so-called self-X properties, such as self-organisation, self-configuration or self-healing. In such dynamic systems, trust is an important prerequisite to enable the usage of Organic Computing systems and algorithms in market-ready products in the future. The OC-Trust project aims at introducing trust mechanisms to improve and assure the interoperability of subsystems. In this paper, we deal with aspects of organic systems regarding trustworthiness on the subsystem level (agents) in a desktop grid system. We develop an agent-based simulation of a desktop grid to show, that the introduction of trust concepts improves the system´s performance, in such that they speed up the processes on the agent level. Specifically, we investigate a bottom-up self-organised development of trust structures that create coalition groups of agents that work more efficiently than standard algorithms. Here, an agent can determine individually to what extent it belongs to a Trusted Community.