Conceptual framework demonstrates gaps in computational trust for cyber-physical systems, highlighting the necessity of an engineering discipline with certification pathways for autonomous decisions.
Computational trust is not a new subject. It has been studied formally for three decades, since Stephen Marsh's 1994 doctoral thesis first proposed trust as a quantity amenable to computation. This paper states plainly what already exists in the computational trust literature, locates precisely where that body of work stops short of the needs of autonomous industrial and cyber-physical systems, and proposes Computational Trust Engineering (CTE), an engineering discipline built on it, in the same relationship that functional safety engineering bears to reliability theory. The claim advanced is narrow and falsifiable: no existing programme currently unifies trust decay, multi-agent trust propagation, information-theoretic bounds on trust, and a governance-integrated composition model into a single engineering discipline with an explicit certification trajectory for autonomous decisions in industrial and cyber-physical contexts.
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Ramakrishnan Sankara (2026) studied this question.
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