MSc Sini Ruohomaa will defend her doctoral thesis The effect of reputation on trust decisions in inter-enterprise collaborations on Friday the 4th of May, 2012 at noon in the University of Helsinki Main Building, Unioninkatu 34, Auditorium XIV (old part), 3rd floor.
The effect of reputation on trust decisions in inter-enterprise collaborations
Inter-enterprise collaboration has become essential for enterprise success. Competition between supply chains and networks of enterprises brings with it a need to participate in multiple collaborations simultaneously. We propose to increase the automation of the routine decision processes where possible, which reduces the cost and effort of collaboration establishment and management.
Inter-enterprise collaboration builds on trust. Relying on autonomous partner enterprises for a joint venture creates uncertainty and risks, which must be balanced by a willingness to collaborate despite the loss of control. Trust decisions are first made on establishing the collaboration to ensure an acceptable balance between the risks of the commitment and its benefits to the participant. In addition, measures are taken during the collaboration in order to keep this balance.
We define a trust management architecture where autonomous actors make automated, local trust decisions based on private policy. The decision-making process considers identified risks to assets as well as incentives, and learns from both first-hand and globally shared experience on the behaviour of business peers. While trust decisions help protect enterprise assets locally, a feedback loop through shared experiences also provides social pressure to respect contracts in the entire ecosystem. Trust decisions can be adjusted to different and changing business situations through policy configurations. Policy-defined routine decisions are automated, while others are passed to a human user. This system is a part of the Pilarcos collaboration management infrastructure, which includes services for partner discovery and interoperability checking, contract negotiation, breach detection and recovery.
Our contribution encompasses the information model, algorithm and process for making multi-dimensional trust decisions, aggregation algorithms for past experiences, and methods for adjusting the trust decisions. We have implemented the architecture and analyzed its properties, such as adjustability and attack resistance.
Availability of the dissertation
An electronic version of the doctoral dissertation is available on the e-thesis site at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-10-7912-2.
Printed copies are available on request from Sini Ruohomaa: 050-5810722 tai sini.ruohomaa@cs.helsinki.fi.