Making Multi-Dimensional Trust Decisions on Inter-Enterprise Collaborations

Abstract

Abstract-Enterprise computing is moving towards more open, collaborative systems. Joining a business network must be made efficient, despite the technical and semantic interoperability challenges involved in connecting different information and communication systems. Trust or lack thereof forms a pragmatic challenge: partners must continuously evaluate whether they trust each other enough to collaborate in the face of risk. Supporting technology is needed for making trust-based decisions on routine business transactions and observing the business peers for malicious or incorrect behaviour on interactions. We present a trust model for automating routine decision-making which considers both risk probabilities and tolerance valuations in the enterprise, and is dynamically updated based on new experience gathered both locally and from third parties.

Detecting and Reacting to Changes in Reputation Flows

“…To evaluate the risk of proceeding with the collaboration, we predict the outcome it would have on different assets based on previous experiences, stored in reputation information [6]. For the purposes of this paper, we only consider the effects on the monetary asset.…”

“…The risk tolerance policy defines a minimum level of certainty required for an automated decision; certainty is influenced by a set of factors, measuring the amount and quality of reputation information used in the decision. A central measure of the quality of the information is its credibility -reputation based on local observations is ultimately credible, while the credibility of external reputation information varies [6,8].…”

“…The decision process consists of two parts [6]: First, reputation information is combined with a model of the decision context in order to estimate the risks of a positive decision. Second, this estimate is compared to a risk tolerance policy for the particular type of decision in order to determine the outcome: yes, proceed; no, withdraw; or, if the result falls on a gray area between the two, forward the decision to a human user.…”

Tools and Infrastructure Facilities for Controlling Non-Functional Properties in Inter-Enterprise in Collaborations

“…• decision-making policies in respect to reputationbased trust, risk and importance tolerances [22];…”

Automating Decisions for Inter-Enterprise Collaboration Management

“…We define trust as the extent to which one party is willing to participate in a given action with a given partner in a given situation, considering the risks and incentives involved [16]. Risk we express as the potential benefits and costs of a positive trust decision to a set of assets -namely: money, control of autonomy, and customer satisfaction representing different domains of reasoning -each separately on a scale of expected major or minor loss or gain.…”