Research On The Key Technology Of Peer-to-Peer Trust-Awareness And Trusted Collaborative Business Negotiation Systems

With the rapid development of e-Business/e-Commerce, one of the most emergent problems is to how to make e-Business users to conduct more effective interaction and collaboration. Whether for the organization or the consumer, business negotiation is always the essential activity in the Internet-based business transactions. Business negotiation has always been the most critical interactive behavior in any development stages of business transaction.Along with the development of Peer-to-Peer technology, P2P collaborative application systems have been applied widely. P2P collaborative application systems provide highly flexible interactive environment and convenient resources access interfaces, virtual remote collaboration and resources sharing, and allow dynamic virtual groups formed among collaborative nodes. These collaborative nodes can jointly manage the resources, empowerment and information to reach their common goals. Through Internet, the users from anywhere can work together to achieve file-sharing, instant messaging or virtual remote collaboration.E-Business is the most popular and active application in P2P collaborative systems. The users involved in the P2P business transaction are anonymous and space-decentralized, which makes electronic business more convenient and flexible. But it also increases the risk of business activities and security threats, as well as a large number of fraud and unreliable services. As nodes in P2P system are more rational and selfish, and their target is to maximize their own network utility, which led to P2P nodes prefer obtaining to contributing resources. Business transaction partners obtain the greatest possible benefits by mutually beneficial cooperation. Whether in the traditional business transactions or in the emerging e-Business, trust is the basis for bilateral and multilateral cooperation, and is the core factor for successful trading. How to establish and maintain trust mechanism with safety and security in P2P network environment, and how to guarantee reliable interaction and collaboration between distributed entities, have become the essential and hot issues in the study of distributed P2P network application.At the same time, through the in-depth analysis of business negotiation and collaboration theory, the author finds that there exist some inadequacies in the current research work of collaboration in P2P business negotiation: lacking in thorough analysis and study of business negotiation activities; lacking in formalized modeling methods and technologies for P2P trust aware collaborative business negotiation systems; particularly lacking in effective trust mechanism for the accumulation of trust assessment in order to construct further collaborative and interactive behaviors in the open and dynamic P2P collaborative application systems.Therefore, this paper studies the formation of cooperative groups and the establishment of trust mechanism among the cooperative nodes in P2P environment. After determining the trust relationship among the entities (nodes), the author focuses on the study of collaborative and interactive models for the trusted collaborative business negotiation (TCBN) systems. During the collaborative negotiation evaluation stage, according to their subjective experience, negotiation participators should calculate the trust feedback score, which combines with the assessment of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, recommended information, etc. The trust feedback information should be kept in the resource database for the further trusted interactive collaboration.The combination of policy-based trust management with reputation-based trust management provides a broader trust management concept and an even stronger authorization and trust mechanism for P2P collaborative application systems. Therefore, a collaborative trust negotiation strategy based on LTTP (Local Trusted Third Party) is proposed. With LTTP and the trust mechanism, and through the expansion of the eager strategy and the PRUNES strategy, the issue of trust negotiation circular dependency strategy is solved effectively. LTTP-based trust negotiation strategy is efficient and complete. It can reduce the exchange number of certificates, reduce network overhead, and, ensure the success rate of negotiation as far as possible.Based on the analysis of the current P2P-based trust models, and in view of the inadequacies of the existing global trust models, this paper proposed a global trust model combined recommendations with incentive mechanism for online business transactions. This model combines the factors of entity feedback score, recent trust value, evaluator's trust value, and transaction value as well as time weights to form an integrated trust value. The characteristics of our integrated business-transaction-oriented trust model are verified by theoretical analysis and simulation results.After a thorough investigation on business negotiation activities, the author discovers that business negotiation activities are characterized by asynchronism, parallelity, concurrency, and uncertainty, and that Petri net is a general and systematic tool for mathematical and graphic description and analysis and especially suitable for dynamic modeling for those information systems of the above-mentioned characteristics. Through the expansion of Colored Petri Net with the connotation of negotiation activities and the classification of the elements concerning the negotiation activities according to the individualities, the author constructs an expanded CPN system - BN_CPN (Business-Negotiation-oriented Colored Petri Network system), which can be used to implement the formalized dynamic modeling in light of negotiation activities. With BN_CPN as the modeling tools, the author constructs a formalized dynamic model -Φmodel for traditional business activities. Then, taking the application characteristics of collaborative business negotiation system into account, the author divides the architecture of TCBN systems into four function sub-modules, namely, collaborative negotiation analysis sub-module (A sub-module), collaborative negotiation design sub-module (D-module), interactive collaborative negotiation sub-module (N sub-module), and collaborative negotiation evaluation sub-module (E-module). In collaborative negotiation evaluation E-module, based on our business-transaction-oriented integrated trust model, the author designs a trust feedback mechanism. The trust assessment of collaborative entities (nodes) is recalculated and optimized by the accumulation value of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, recommendation and incentives. These provide more efficient and reasonable trust mechanism for further trusted collaborative interaction.With the help of the study on the characteristics of P2P trust management technology, a trust management middleware combined policy-based trust management with reputation-based trust management for P2P collaborative application systems is constructed. Middleware interfaces abstract the specific operation details of trust management, and facilitate the customization of collaboration application expansion. The general trust management framework services improve the interoperability among collaborative applications. With trust management middleware, nodes can participate dynamically in collaborative groups, maintain trust certificates, collect trust information, establish trust relationship, and achieve trust aware collaborative behavior.Finally, a virtual negotiation environment VNegotiationRoom that supports TCBN system is established, which is based on the implementation framework of TCBN formalized models, trust management middleware, and component-based real-time communication and collaboration technology. VNegotiationRoom validates the correctness and the effectiveness of our trust management mechanism for P2P collaborative application systems, TCBN formalized modeling methods, ADNE implementation framework model, trust management middleware and real-time communication and collaboration technology. The common problems above-mentioned in present research on TCBN are thereby effectively solved. The main contributions in this dissertation can be summarized as the following:●A collaborative trust negotiation strategy based on LTTP (Local Trusted Third Party) is proposed. With LTTP and the trust mechanism, and through the expansion of the active strategy and the reduction strategy, the issue of trust negotiation cyclic dependency strategy is solved effectively.●A global trust model based on recommendations and incentive mechanism for online business transactions is proposed. This model combined the factors of entity feedback score, recent trust value, evaluator's trust value, and transaction value as well as time weights to form an integrated trust value. The characteristics of our integrated business-transaction-oriented trust model are verified by theoretical analysis and simulation results.●Through the expansion of Colored Petri Net system, a modeling tool BN_CPN (Business-Negotiation-oriented Colored Petri Network system) is proposed. With BN_CPN, a formal dynamic model -Φmodel for traditional business activities is constructed.●A set of formalized modeling methods and technologies for the TCBN systems are proposed. Based on our business-transaction-oriented integrated trust model, the trust feedback mechanism is designed. And based on our modeling methods, an implementation framework model for the TCBN systems, ADNE model, is constructed.●A trust management middleware combined policy-based trust management with reputation-based trust management for P2P collaborative application systems is constructed. Middleware interfaces abstract the specific operation details of trust management, and facilitate the customization of collaboration application expansion. The general trust management framework services improve the interoperability among collaborative applications.●Based on the trust management middleware, and component-based real-time communication and collaboration technology, a virtual negotiation environment VNegotiationRoom is developed, which validates the correctness and the effectiveness of our trust management mechanism for P2P collaborative application system, TCBN system formalized modeling methods, ADNE model, trust management middleware and real-time communication and collaboration technology. The trust management mechanism and the structured and formalized modeling methods and technologies suggested in the dissertation have been successfully applied in the sub-project of the project "Research and Application of China-Finland Long Distance Education and Business Negotiation". The project was supported by Shanghai Science and Technology Development Foundation under grant No. 05107017.