A Fuzzy Collaborative Assessment Methodology for Partner Trust Evaluation

AbstractTrust level assessment within collaborative networks is an interesting issue in the partner evaluation and partner selection literature. This paper proposes a fuzzy collaborative assessment methodology for partner trust evaluation within horizontal collaborative networks. The proposed approach concerns a group evaluation context where a decision-making comity associated with a manufacturer needs to evaluate its company's partners for their ranking purposes. Different expertise levels are attributed to the comity members. In this paper, trust level is evaluated based on information-sharing attributes considered in the literature as critical influencing factors. Different weights are associated with these attributes with respect to their corresponding influence on trust. The semantic fuzzy partitioning method is considered for the collaborative trust assessment based on unbalanced linguistic term sets representing information-sharing attributes. The developed approach is applied to a real case showing its effectiveness and its objectivity.