Guarding enterprise collaborations with trust decisions - the TuBE approach

Enterprise computing is currently moving towards more open, collaborative systems. It becomes essential for enterprise success that joining a business network is made efficient, despite the technical and semantic interoperability challenges involved in connecting different information and communication systems. Trust management is an important factor in the collaboration, as traditional trust-building over months of negotiations has become too slow a method in routine cases. As no business network is feasible without mutual trust between partners, the supporting technology should provide mechanisms for forming trust relationships, making automatic trust-based decisions on routine business transactions, and observing the business peers for malicious or incorrect behaviour on interactions. This paper describes a trust model to fulfil these needs, and gives a strategical overview of the system implementing this model.