A Survey of Trust in Workflows and Relevant Contexts

With the fast-growing Internet technology, several service-based interactions are prevalent and appear in several forms such as e-commerce, content provider, Virtual Organizations, Peer-to-Peer, Web Service, Grids, Cloud Computing, and individual interactions. This demands for an effective mechanism to establish trust among participants in a high-level abstract way, capturing relevant factors ranging on Service Level Agreement, security policies, requirements, regulations, constraints, Quality of Service, reputation, and recommendation. Trust is platform-independent and flexible to be seamlessly integrated into heterogeneous domains and interoperate with different security solutions in distributed environments. Establishing trust in a service workflow leads to the willingness of services to participate. Coordinating service workflows without trust consideration may pose higher risks, possibly results in poor performance, additional vulnerabilities, or failures. Although trust in service workflows and relevant contexts has been studied for a past decade, the standard development is still immature. Nowadays, trust approaches to service workflows comprise a large area of research where one can hardly classify into a comprehensive survey. This survey examines and explores the role of trust in service workflows and their contexts from a wide variety of literatures. Various mechanisms, architecture, techniques, standards, and frameworks are explained along the way with discussions. Working trust definition and classification are newly provided and supported with examples.