Supply Chain Optimization, Management and Integration by Wang John

Author:Wang, John...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-21T23:50:46.487000+00:00

Although communications among participants in a supply chain network can take many forms, they can be abstracted into two major types: read and write operation on a data item. For instance, when a wholesaler queries a sales data from a retailer, the wholesaler actually attempts to read the sales data. A supply chain partner may also be allowed to update (i.e., write) certain data owned by its peers. For instance, if a retailer identifies a low level of inventory of a particular category of products, it may automatically generate an order and send to a manufacturer. In a fully automatic system, the retailer may be allowed to update the customer order data maintained by the manufacturer. So, the corresponding products can be packed and shipped to the retailer. To manage the risks of allowing downstream and upstream partners to access information, a participant must maintain a list of trustworthy partners, such as the trusted suppliers, clients, and customers. We next introduce a detailed trust evaluation approach.

Trust Evaluation

Given the size, scope, dynamics, and complexity of a supply chain network, direct evaluation of every participant is difficult. It is not realistic to expect every participant to have solid knowledge of all others. In fact, some participants may not know each other at all. Therefore, trust transitivity is an effective way to evaluate the trustworthiness of a non-adjacent entity. To do that, a supply chain participant must rely on some trusted intermediate partners to recommend unknown or unfamiliar entities in the supply chain network. Furthermore, in order to use trust as a decision criteria, there must be a formal way to represent trust, calculate the trust value of a given entity, and then determine risks based on, along with other factors, the evaluated trust value of the requestor. Next, we define trust related terminologies as used in our model.

Trust Certificate and Trust Certificate Space

The proposed delegation-based trust evaluation requires distinguishing two types of trust: attribute trust and recommendation trust. They describe different trust relationships between two entities. An attribute trust represents that a trustor believes a trustee posses certain positive attributes and, hence, is trustworthy in fulfilling a certain mission or performing a particular function. Recommendation trust, on the other hand, represents that a trustor believes that a trustee will make a sound, honest, and unbiased recommendation about other subjects’ trustworthiness and hence the trustor can rely on the trustee’s opinions to assess the attributes of other subjects. The two types of trust are represented using a similar data structure, called a trust certificates. A trust certificate is a well-formatted digital document issued by a supply chain participant, representing that the document holder, called subject, has certain attributes (for an attribute trust certificate) or is trusted to make sound and reliable recommendations about other subjects (for a recommendation trust certificate).

Components of a trust certificate are described in Figure 2, where Certificate Type specifies the category of the trust certificate: an attribute certificate or a recommendation certificate; Subject represents the supply chain participant which

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