Building trust for service assessment in Internet-enabled collaborative product design and realization environments.

摘要

Reducing costs, increasing speed and leveraging the intelligence of partners involved during product design processes are important benefits of Internet-enabled collaborative product design and realization environments. The options for cost-effective product design, re-design or improvement are at their peak during the early stages of the design process and designers can collaborate with suppliers, manufacturers and other relevant contributors to acquire a better understanding of associated costs and product viability. Collaboration is by no means a new paradigm. However, companies have found distrust of collaborative partners to be the most intractable obstacle to collaborative commerce and Internet-enabled business especially in intellectual property environments, which handle propriety data on a constant basis. This problem is also reinforced in collaborative environments that are distributed in nature. Thus trust is the main driver or enabler of successful collaborative efforts or transactions in Internet-enabled product design environments.; Focus is on analyzing the problem of 'trust for services' in distributed collaborative service provider assessment and selection, concentrating on characteristics specific to electronic product design (e-Design) environments. Current tools for such collaborative partner/provider assessment are inadequate or non-existent and researching network, user, communication and service trust problems, which hinder the growth and acceptance of true collaboration in product design, can foster new frontiers in manufacturing, business and technology. Trust and its associated issues within the context of a secure Internet-enabled product design & realization platform is a multifaceted and complex problem, which demands a strategic approach crossing disciplinary boundaries. A Design Environment Trust Service (DETS) framework is proposed to incorporate trust for services in product design environments based on client specified (or default) criteria. This involves the analysis of validated network (objective) data and non-network (subjective) data and the use of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methodology for the selection of the most efficient service provision alternative through the minimization of distance from a specified ideal point and interpreted as a Dynamic (Design) Trust Index (DTI) or rank. Hence, the service requestor is provided with a quantifiable degree of belief to mitigate information asymmetry and enable knowledgeable decision-making regarding trustworthy service provision in a distributed environment.