Recent years have seen an unprecedented acceleration in the evolution of the Internet as the technological vehicle underpinning the expansion of service provision and inter-/intra-enterprise integration in all market sectors. This brings about the prospect of ad hoc integration of systems across organisational boundaries to support collaborations that may last for a single transaction or evolve dynamically over many years. We see new requirements for scalability, responsiveness and adaptability that necessitate the on-demand creation and self-management of dynamically evolving Virtual Organisations (VO) spanning national and enterprise borders, where the participating entities (enterprises or individuals) pool resources, information and knowledge in order to achieve common objectives.
The objective of the TrustCoM (Trust and Contract Management) project, a European project where SICS is a partner, is to develop technology that will enable smooth and secure sharing of resources in VOs. The envisioned technology is to support ad-hoc collaborative ventures, i.e., when business opportunities arise, potential partners should be identified, their trustworthiness should be evaluated, and a cooperation agreement should be defined -- all of this done with minimum delay in time and at a low cost.
Part of the collaboration agreement between the partners will specify the policies of the partners with respect to how shared resources should be accessed. These policies will be transformed into security policies, that will be used by security mechanisms to control inter-partner use ofresources.
In the TrustCoM project, SICS will focus on models and mechanisms for (high-level) service contracts, with special emphasis on the structuring ofsets of contracts, potentially covering independent VOs that an organisation is partner of.
For more information see
http://www.sics.se/projects/trustcom
Sponsor: European Commission, 6th Framework Programme
Contact point: Babak Sadighi