A Type-2 Fuzzy Model to Prioritize Suppliers Based on Trust Criteria in Intelligent Agent-Based Systems

In the last two decades the intelligent agents have improved the lifestyle of human beings from different aspects of view such as life activities and services. Considering the importance of the safety and security role in the e-procurement, there have been many systems developed including trust engine. In particular, some of the first systems were modeled though trust evaluation concepts as crisp values, but now a days to adjust the systems with real world cases, the uncertainty and impreciseness parameters must be considered with the use of fuzzy sets theory. In this paper to minimize the number of exceptions related to suppliers, Trust Management Agent (TMA) is considered to prioritize candidate suppliers based on trust criteria. Due to lots of uncertainties, type-2 fuzzy sets prove to be a most suitable methodology to deal with the trust evaluation process efficiently. In this regard, a new evaluation process based on hierarchical Linguistic Weighted Averaging (LWA) sets is proposed. The solution method was then illustrated through a simple example which clarifies the suitability as well as the simplicity of the proposed method for the category of the defined problem.

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