Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting GOLD an infrastructural approach to virtual organisations

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting about the project ● Lots of VO definitions – All different – None entirely satisfactory ● Lots of different types of VO – Greatly differing requirements – Different degress/aspects of ‘virtual’ ● Hard to write a definition that includes them all without being too general

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting types of VO ● Very different types of organisation that involve some aspect of virtual working: – Franchises, such as fast food outlets, building society counters, travel agents etc. – Utilities companies such as gas, electric, railway etc. selling services based on a separately-managed infrastructure. Also, the company or companies managing that infrastructure. – Companies with long-term outsourcing agreements. For example, outsourcing of IT or payroll services. – Companies using short-term outsourcing agreements to meet particular needs on-demand. For example, chemicals companies requiring specific expertise; scientific companies needing additional compute resource; supply-chain based companies wishing to respond flexibly to exceptions etc. – Truly distributed companies with different functions supplied by different organisations but no central management function.

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting infrastructural approach ● Diverse requirements demand an infrastructural approach – Core services implementing VO behaviour – VOs at or close to application level – Maximum flexibility – Loose coupling ● Needed: – Standards – Middleware – Infrastructure – Languages

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting VO infrastructure ● Coordination ● Information management ● Security ● Trust

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting proof of concept ● The infrastructure will be tested by applying it to R&D projects within the chemicals industry ● Project=VO ● Highly dynamic – Membership – Focus – Basis of interaction between parties

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: requirements ● Conventional approaches are difficult when: – The technology doesn’t exist – The business use doesn’t exist – The potential users have no basis for thinking about requirements ● They don’t know what they want to do ● They don’t know what their non-functional requirements are (security, dependability etc.) ● An ethnographic approach is being taken – Interviews with target organisations – Studies of how they do things at the moment – Understanding of business context – Iterative development in step with requirements capture

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: requirements ● Interviews with several chemicals companies have taken place – These have confirmed some of our ideas about VOs – And have changed others – A great deal of enthusiasm ● A diverse set of functional and non-functional requirements is being gathered ● We are beginning to understand the real business context: what VOs can do, how people want to use them, what is their potential? (more on this later) ● SSM models of organisations constructed

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: coordination and trust ● Distributed workflow enactment – Our own language with semantics defined using pi calculus – Compositions can be model checked using SPIN – Basic system works, basic GUI implemented – Further work needed on GUI, composition/deployment tools, monitoring, management – Further work required on defining tasks, task management, communication etc.

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: coordination and trust ● Contract management – Contracts mediate interactions between organisations, describing rights, obligations, constraints etc. ● This provides evidence in the case of disputes ● And can be used for coordination – Promela used as a specification language for describing contracts – Basic contract mediators implemented – Need to investigate how to integrate with workflow enactment and access control

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: coordination and trust ● Non-repudiable interactions – Actions must be attributable to the parties who performed them and commitments to the committing party – Non-repudiable interactions implemented on J2EE ● Works for interactions between Java objects over RMI – Currently being re-implemented for SOAP using appropriate WS standards – Prototype working

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: coordination and trust ● Summary – We can run business processes over organisational boundaries – We can specify and police interactions using electronic contracts – We can construct non-repudiable audit trails – Integration needed

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: information management ● Each party has heterogeneous, distributed and autonomous information sources ● These need to be integrated in non-trivial ways – Dynamic information integration/sharing and business composition – Dynamic security – Notification – Ontology – Discovery – Personalisation

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: information management ● Test/development platform built (based on Oracle) ● Requirements captured ● Architecture proposed ● Services identified (IAS, DBPMS, LCS etc.) ● Significant interest from Oracle ● Need to: – define services – Formalise the information model – Implement

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: security ● Looking for a formal answer to the question “what is a dynamic coalition?” ● Models of: – What a VO is – What knowledge is – How it is transferred ● Some models produced and will be used to analyse information flows in VOs

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: security ● RBAC and TBAC have been investigated ● Dynamic AC investigated – Can the infrastructure dynamically control access based on policies? – Prototype constructed based on existing technologies

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting progress: general ● Candidate architecture proposed ● Core services defined ● Framework for building and managing VOs constructed ● Demos available (at this meeting) in all major areas

Rob Smith April 21, /18 GOLD Project Update Meeting summary ● The project has been running for about 1 year ● Recruitment is complete (visa problems notwithstanding) ● Progress has been very good: – Strong understanding of industrial requirements – Candidate architecture – Prototypes in most major areas – Lots of talks/outreach events ● Still a great deal to do! – Architecture – Integration – Testing