Fuzzy decision support for service selection in e-business environments

Abstract

The emergence of semantic overlay networks as instruments to improve security, trust and stability in distributed virtual communities is recognized widely in the research community. We propose a fuzzy logic based framework which integrates social information such as trustworthiness, reputation and credibility ratings for individuals, alliances, organizations, services and products in e-commerce markets. This framework is designed to support the decision making process of autonomous agents during the selection of the optimal business partner. Fuzzy systems provide the ideal capabilities to process multiple criteria, which are composed of imprecise information and attribute definitions expressed in natural language. The proposed fuzzy models implement the DEco Arch framework and ontologies which provide details about concepts and their relationships in virtual communities