Flexible Regulation of Dynamic Coalitions

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National Science FoundationDistributed Systems Research CISE/CNSABSTRACTProposal Number: 0410485Principal Investigator: Minsky, NaftalyInstitution: Rutgers Univ New BrunswickProposal Title: Flexible Regulation of Dynamic CoalitionsThere 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. FleischProgram Director, CISE/CNSJune 28, 2004.