Computational Trust in Cloud Manufacturing

Abstract

Cloud manufacturing is a new kind of advanced service-oriented network manufacturing paradigm. There are two kinds of nodes in this network manufacturing environment: manufacturing service nodes (service providers) encapsulated by manufacturing resources and task nodes (service customers). One of the bases of building up the collaborative relationships between customers and providers in cloud manufacturing environment is their reciprocal trust. However, vicious, mendacious, and inveracious information makes it quite difficult for customers to find reliable and high-quality providers to form virtual manufacturing systems for efficiently responding to market demands in cloud manufacturing environment, viz. service consumers often have insufficient information on service providers. The trustworthy network manufacturing environment is a prerequisite to implementation of cloud manufacturing. In this paper the notion of human trust is extended to the cloud manufacturing. A computational trust model which combines the direct computational reliability and the computational reputation is presented, and the simulating result confirms it valid.