A goal-oriented trust model for virtual organization creation

Virtual organization (VO) is a main organizational paradigm for enterprises to collaborate in the rapidly changing environment. Advances in information and communication technologies are accelerating collaboration among enterprises in different domains as well as unknown enterprises. In this environment, an enterprise faces more chances to cooperate with other enterprises through the internet. Trust is a key concept in many kinds of interactions, allowing an enterprise to act under uncertainty and with the risk of negative consequences. To minimize the operating risk and guarantee the success of a VO, trust evaluation of potential partners should be considered during the partner selection process. However, trust evaluation methods in the literature have limitations in applying them to small and medium enterprises because they are based on evaluation of human experts. In this paper, a goal-oriented trust model is proposed to evaluate the trust values of enterprises. In the context, trust is the probability that a trustee satisfies the goals when it completes assigned tasks. This paper introduces the concept of a goal-oriented trust model with the core constructs of a goal, a project, a task, and a capability. It further addresses an example of applying the proposed model to the partner selection process of a project-based VO creation.