GOLD

1. an infrastructural approach to virtual organisations GOLD

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. VO infrastructure • Coordination • Information management • Security • Trust

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. progress: general • Candidate architecture proposed • Core services defined • Framework for building and managing VOs constructed • Demos available (at this meeting) in all major areas

18. 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