On development of TrustMan system assisting configuration of temporary consortiums

Abstract

Managing coalition networks of organisations is gradually becoming more complex and challenging as the current trends of the market conditions are becoming more dynamic. The dynamism nature is experienced in many aspects including: advances in technologies, rising demand of resources for each opportunity, growing volatility of opportunities, and so forth. Owing to advances in digital technology, emerging breakthrough solutions responding to market needs are becoming increasingly innovative and complex. A large amount of resources, competencies, skills, etc. are required to accomplish such solutions, usually beyond capabilities and capacities of a single organisation. The emergence of coalition networks of organisations as breeding environments for creation of temporary consortiums has enhanced the possibility of success for organisations by facilitating their collaborations. One obstacle to configuration of such consortiums as well as collaboration has been the difficulty in assessing the trust level of potential partners. So far, the assessment of trust level has been performed manually by organisations and in an ad hoc manner, which is both time consuming and hardly produces accurate results. Consequently, the formation of collaborative initiatives in the form of temporary consortiums has become more challenging and organisations are reluctant to work with each other. This paper addresses the supervised automation of the assessment of trust level of organisations in coalition networks to smoothen the formation of temporary consortiums. It first presents the concepts of a system developed to support the management of long-term coalition networks of organisations. It then addresses the design and development of Trust Management system by focusing its analysed specifications, designed architectures and applied implementation aspects.

Keywords:

• trust management system
• inter-organisational trust
• virtual organisations breeding environments (VBE)
• VBE management
• VBE management system
• temporary consortiums

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the ECOLEAD project funded by the European Commission. The authors are grateful for contributions from partners in the ECOLEAD consortium. Please note that this paper is an extended version of our previous paper presented at the BASYS’08 conference.