Trust evaluation for buyer-supplier relationship concerning fuzzy approach

This paper provides a review of the literature on the trust issue mainly considering organizational level relationships. The review highlights trust evaluation being a multi-layer multi-criteria and often context-dependent process which commonly uses various sources of evidence to judge the trustworthiness of trustees. Trust has been referred to as a major requirement for a successful supply chain partner relationship, also known highly influential in managing supply risks. It is also known a major issue with respect to buyer-supplier relationships in the agent based as well as e-procurement systems. Qualitative and fuzzy type information is commonly used in the trust evaluation process. Thus, this factor has to be taken into account in the modeling stage. The review also reveals that the issue of trust has not been well investigated in the supply chain partner relationship, in particular in the agent-based and e-commerce environments. In this respect, this paper aims to highlight improvement potentials with regard to the trust decision in buyer-supplier relationships. In this regard, the paper presents a generalized structure for the trust evaluation process. Finally, to illustrate the modeling aspects of the proposed process, a rule based fuzzy ranking model is discussed considering a simplified trust evaluation problem.