Seminar: Trends in Enterprise Interoperability - Trust Management for Networked

58314303
3
Hajautetut järjestelmät ja tietoliikenne
Syventävät opinnot
Vuosi Lukukausi Päivämäärä Periodi Kieli Vastuuhenkilö
2014 syksy 02.09-09.12. 1-2 Englanti Lea Kutvonen

Luennot

Aika Huone Luennoija Päivämäärä
Ti 14-16 C220 Lea Kutvonen 02.09.2014-14.10.2014
Ti 14-16 C220 Lea Kutvonen 28.10.2014-09.12.2014

Information for international students

 

Trends in Enterprise interoperability - Trust management for networked enterprise systems

 

 

Please note:

The first seminar meeting (for organisation) will be a week later than initially announced. We will have an opening session on Tue 9.9.2014. For that session, please find and read in a cursory way the material posted here at latest on Wed 3.9.

Note that there is a new tab on this page for all schedule items, materials, and tasks.

Background

Capabilities of networked collaboration between independent organisations has become a critical success factor both in private sector (enterprises, companies) and public sector (governmental organisations, 3rd party actors). Computer science and software engineering can provide efficient collaboration environments for such networked collaboration, despite of the business domain at hand (healthcare, forest industry, new innovative application areas) by providing service ecosystem infrastructure support for the independent organisations. This support includes facilities such as selecting partners for networked business, interoperability management, collaboration contract management, and breach resolution. These facilities are essential elements of service oriented computing (SOC, SOA) as well.

Enterprise interoperability

Enterprise interoperability denotes the capability of enterprises (e.g., companies, organisations from public sector, independent units within organisations) to govern mutual activities with the help of their independent computing systems.

Obstacles for enterprise interoperability can arise from conceptual and technological domains, but also from the organisational domain. Examples of conceptual barriers include mismatches on the essential concepts on the business area, like one security-service producer considering security to include physical security measures only, while the client acts on software licencing where software tools would be more relevant. Examples of technological barriers include mismatches in computing platforms and their communciation. Finally, organisational barriers arise in the mismatches on expected responsibility and authority structures used in partner enterprises, causing mismatches on decision-making and approval processes involving all partner enterprises.

Therefore, enterprise interoperability is addressed by multidiciplinary research: social, organisational, economical, business sciences; computer science and software engineering; and modeling of organisations, software and systems. Research methods involved also vary depending on the aspect under study, but due to the nature of the field, should always combine the user requirements (enterprise, people, interoperation from enterprise to another) with the aligned  computing solutions.

Trust in SOC and EI 

Trust management is a fundamental capability of ecosystems both from the SOC (service oriented computing) and EI (enterprise interoperability) point of view. Without trust there cannot be any business, but nevertheless, trust between organisations and their computing systems have traditionally been implicitly assumed and no tools for controlling collaborations from this perspective have been made widely available. However, as automation on collaboration management increases also trust decisions are forced to be explicit and supported by automated information collection and potentially also artificial intelligence decision making.

Currently thre is no single internet-wide trust management standard, but instead, researchers are suggesting a good variety of different solutions with different expectations on the way companies and public sector organsiations would utilise trust management facilities. Therefore, event the definitions on the field are varied.

In the CINCO group, trust decision is defined as a decision to commit to collaboration with a set of partners each carrying responsibilty of a component service for a joint, composed service provision. Therefore, in this kind of environment trust is a dynamic property depending on a situation, and unidirectional as well. Other researchers have provided different definitions, for example, requiring mutual circles of trust to be formed where a gatekeeper makes trust (membership) decisions on behalf of all the circle members. Further, trust decisions and related information can be based on different facilities, such as certificates or repuation. 

Purpose of the seminar

The aim of the seminar is to get familiar with a number of trust management approaches as presented in the litterature and learn about the motivations behind these approaches. The case study examples are picked to represent the major solution trends.

The seminar gives sufficient background for starting a MSc thesis on the topic area and conceptual background for hands-on practicing in CINCOLab.

The focus on the presentations must be on the computer science or software engineering side of the development, although requirements analysis elements in the approaches studied do draw from other scientific areas as well. We apply scientific results from other domains only to learn to develop our own computer science based solutions to a valid direction. 

Potential topics and working method

Initial impressions on trust management can be drawn from papers published by the CINCO group members, especially survey papers. 

Own topic suggestions are wellcomed, but also own topics must go through the advisory process to succeed in scoping and focus selection. 

The seminar starts with a shared discussion phase where a) the subject domain is introduced, b) initial topic areas are selected, and c) scientific writing help and peer review takes place. On the very first weeks, each participant is interviewed as part of the topic refinement phase. As the result of this individual advisory the main reference material is selected and the focus of the seminar paper and presentation is agreed. The initial topic areas are too wide as such, but the students' background affects the choise of reading material quite a lot.

As an important milestone, full papers will be circulated for peer review and for advisor feedback. The papers are corrected quickly based on the feedback, so they must be more or less complete papers at the submission time.

Finally, the second period will be used fo the presentations. 

The papers and presentations have either a conference style (2-column papers in IEEE style and 30 minute slot for presentations and discussion) or learning style with in-depth style (1-column papers in thesis style and 45 minute presentation slots) dependind on the appropriateness for the group as a whole. This will be decided in the beginnig of the seminar.