Trust based contracting in virtual organizations: A concept based on contract workflow management systems

For participants in virtual organizations it is necessary to work together on a temporary basis in order to solve specific problems. Both the search for adequate partners and the organizational set-up have to be very fast and efficient. The main difficulty of building a cooperation lies in finding the right balance between time-consuming, but safe ways based on traditional contracts, and less reliable, but faster ways based solely on traditional forms of trust. This paper introduces a contract/trust based solution and describes a computer-supported negotiation process to make the process of creating a virtual organization fast and safe at the same time. We propose an interorganizational workflow based on a combination of a minimal set of contractual documents supplemented by trust-based features. The workflow enables partners to establish a temporary cooperation agreement within a relatively short time. As workflow modelling language we have chosen so-called XML-nets, a novel variant of high level Petri nets which combines interorganizational workflow models with XML-document descriptions.