Flexible Regulation of Dynamic Coalitions

National Science Foundation

Distributed Systems Research

CISE/CNS

ABSTRACT

Proposal Number: 0410485

Principal Investigator: Minsky, Naftaly

Institution: Rutgers Univ New Brunswick

Proposal Title: Flexible Regulation of Dynamic Coalitions

There is a growing tendency for organizations of various kinds to form coalitions in order to collaborate. And there is a critical need for such coalitions (sometimes called grids) to be regulated in order to ensure conformance with their defining policy and in order to protect the interest of member organizations. With current technologies, such a regula-tion is usually carried out in an ad hoc manner, often involving manual intervention by administrators of individual organizations, or by officers of the coalition. This makes the deployment of a coalition, and its evolution, very laborious, inflexible and unreliable.

The objectives of this project is to develop a regulatory mechanism for dynamic coali-tions, that has the following characteristics: (1) high expressive power; (2) scalable en-forcement; and (3) flexibility, which means that (i) each member-organization is able to formulate its internal policy, and to change it at will---subject only to the global coalition policy---independently of the internal policies of other organizations in the coalition; (ii) and it is easy for a new member to join a given coalition.

This project should have the following impact: First, it would provide flexible and secure means for various organizations to collaborate by forming coalitions. Second, the con-cept of policy-hierarchy to be developed, would be useful in many domains, besides coa-litions--such as in establishing regulatory frameworks for organizations that consists of many departments. Third, the regulatory mechanism for coalitions would be useful in the teaching of software engineering, distributed systems, and e-commerce.

Dr. Brett D. Fleisch

Program Director, CISE/CNS

June 28, 2004

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