A trust evaluation model towards cloud manufacturing

After cloud manufacturing (CMfg) was put forward as new manufacturing model, the trust evaluation model is a concern by relevant research scholars, in order to ensure transactions in a CMfg system work well and the trust evaluation between transaction entities (ie., resource service providers and consumers) appear crucial. In a CMfg system, in view of the trust issue in resource service transactions, this paper extends the trust evaluation model in the existing related research and proposes a new method and model. In order to make the final trust evaluation values more practical, the proposed method introduces the third-party trust evaluation model based on existing direct and indirect (recommended) trust evaluation models as well as the time decay factor. It also quantifies the fuzzy indexes by using intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS). Thereby, the trust evaluation model increases the credibility of service transaction trust evaluation in a CMfg system.