DVO - Trusted Coordination in Dynamic Virtual Organisations

Project Dates: From September 2003 to August 2006

Project Leader: Prof. Santosh Shrivastava

Staff: Dr. Carlos Molina, Dr. Graham Morgan

Sponsors: EPSRC

Organisations increasingly use the Internet to offer their own services and to utilise the services of others. This naturally leads to information sharing across organisational boundaries. An inter-organisational business relationship is commonly referred to as a virtual organisation (VO). A VO however, blurs the distinction between 'outsiders ' and 'insiders' and yet, organisations forming a VO will want to preserve their individual autonomy and privacy. A central problem in VO management is how organisations can regulate access to their resources by other organisations in a way that ensures that their individual policies for information sharing are honoured. There is an additional complexity as the organisations might not trust each other. New forms of infrastructure support is required that will be capable of supporting interactions in a (potentially) hostile environment: interactions between mutually distrusting organisations over open networks. Given these observations, development of infrastructure support for inter-organisation interactions pose very interesting research problems.

The project will develop tools and techniques to enable VOs to be formed and managed in a trustworthy manner. In particular, trusted coordination mechanisms required for service discovery, composition, deployment, dynamic quality of service (QoS) control and monitoring will be developed and their applicability demonstrated.