A multi-model approach to analyze inter-organizational trust in VBEs

The perceptions, preferences and interpretations of trust differ among the organizations depending on their purposes for establishing trust relationships with others. As a result, different organizations consider different aspects when assessing the trust level of other organizations. Thus a number of complex aspects must be addressed to comprehensively cover the trust objectives of organizations which in turn make it difficult to model and analyze these aspects. Consequently, it is hard to thoroughly cover the needed trust aspects by applying a single modeling tool, system or approach. Integrating models and supporting their interoperability, a challenge on its own, is suggested in this chapter for addressing the analysis of inter-organizational trust. This chapter analyzes and proposes a number of specific models that can be applied to comprehensively cover the fundamental aspects related to interorganizational trust in Virtual organizations Breeding Environments (VBEs).