Self-organizing Trusted Communities (Top-down)

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OC TRUST investigates the usage of social concepts like trust and reputation for open selforganising systems. Open agent systems and open distributed systems are of growing interest due to the increasing internet-based implementation of many applications. Examples are Desktop Grid Computing, Wireless Sensor Networks or Self-organising Networks (SON). Due to the high volatility of such systems, self-organising approaches are advantageous.The project submitted here deals with the application of social mechanisms inside technical systems (system-to-system trust). For this purpose we have developed the concept of Trusted Communities (TC). A TC consists of agents, which take decisions partially autonomously. Their relationship is cooperative or competitive. Since these systems are open we cannot assume that all agents are benevolent. A strong trust relationship inside the TC allows for efficient interactions without double-checking and task reduplication. OC assumes a predominantly decentralised organisation. Such systems scale well and adapt to local situations. However, they can suffer from unwanted emergent effects. It has been a long-term goal of OC research to utilize positive emergence while controlling unwanted negative emergence ("Controlled Emergence"). This is the goal of the work package Emergence (EM). During the three project phases we equip the agents with increasing social awareness. At the same time the degree of higher-level control and also the degree of disturbances are gradually increased.The central research hypotheses are:1. The inclusion of trust-relevant Information about the behaviour of other agents increases the effectiveness and efficiency of complex technical systems.2. The self-organisation of a trustworthy agent community at runtime can be achieved decentralized or with the help of higher-level mechanisms (institutional control).3. The OC problem of Controlled Emergence can be solved through autonomous social agents whose decision logic is modified by higher-level institutions.After the investigation of purely decentralised Trusted Communities in the project phases 1 and 2, we plan to realize institutional control with the help of norms and sanctions during phase 3. In this project we are interested predominantly in the total system aspect (top-down). The social agents are investigated and developed in the group of Prof. Hähner (Bottom-up). We use the OCu middleware from the workgroup of Prof. Ungerer. The TC concept is practically evaluated in the context of a Desktop Grid Computing system and a Smart Camera network. In addition we will apply the concept to the Trusted Energy Grid (workgroup Prof. Reif) and the Trusted Display Grid (workgroup Prof Andr6).