Manufacturing enterprise collaboration based on a goal-oriented fuzzy trust evaluation model in a virtual enterprise

To cope with the rapidly changing manufacturing environment, enterprise collaboration is getting increasingly more attention than ever before. The virtual enterprise (VE) is a concept that supports temporary alliances of manufacturing enterprises that have various collaboration models, such as extended enterprise, networked enterprise, concurrent enterprise, etc. Selection of trustworthy partners and trust building are important in virtual domains because they have largely been affecting the success of a VE. However, because of its complexity of trust, trust models in the literature are limited in their ability to cope with dynamic and virtual environment. In this paper, we propose a trust evaluation method of supporting enterprise collaboration and maximizing the satisfaction of cooperation. In this context, trust means the goal achievement probability. Trust value of an enterprise can be obtained by a fuzzy inference system whose rule-base is based on the top-level goal of a VE. According to the selector's preference, various rules can be applied to trust evaluation. For further study, the planning and scheduling problems should be considered along with the trust-based partner selection for collaboration among manufacturing enterprises. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.