Goals within Trust-based Digital Ecosystems

Within a digital ecosystem, systems and actors form coalitions for achieving common and individual goals. In a constant motion of collaborative and competitive forces and faced with the risk of malicious attacks, ecosystem participants require strong guarantees of their collaborators’ trustworthiness. Evidence of trustworthy behavior derived from runtime executions can provide these trust guarantees, given that clear definition and delimitation of trust concerns exist. Without them, a base for negotiating expectations, quantifying achievements and identifying strategical attacks cannot be established and attainment of strategic benefits relies solely on vulnerable collaborations. In this paper we examine the relationship between goals and trust and we introduce a formalism for goal representation. We delimit the trust concerns with anti-goals. The anti-goals set the boundaries within which we structure the trust analysis and build up evidence for motivated attacks.