Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/J020494/1
Title:	Trusted Dynamic Coalitions
Principal Investigator:	Missier, Dr P
Other Investigators:	Fitzgerald, Professor J
Researcher Co-Investigators:	Dr JW Bryans
Project Partners:
Department:	Computing Sciences
Organisation:	Newcastle University
Scheme:	Standard Research
Starts:	01 May 2012	Ends:	30 October 2013	Value (£):	99,038
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Computer Sys. & Architecture Information & Knowledge Mgmt Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Aerospace, Defence and Marine Information Technologies
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 09 Feb 2012 Data Intensive Systems (DaISy) Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Businesses are finding more and more ways to take advantage of the internet, and can they can reduce costs and increase their sales by going online. Communication across continents is easier than ever before, and so they can also use the internet to work together. Smaller specialist companies can now compete with large multinationals by working together to distribute sub-tasks of the work to companies specialist in that sub-task. They have then created a "virtual organisation" -- an increasingly common mode of working. Virtual organisations also form when organisations, military forces and bystanders put aside differences and work together to alleviate the consequences of a major disaster. One of the characteristics of these virtual organisations is that they are highly fluid -- as the situation on the ground changes, partners and the trust between them changes, structures change and even the purpose of the virtual organisation can change. In the military sphere, virtual organisations such as these are known as dynamic coalitions. A problem virtual organisations face is that the members often do not trust one another. They may be competitors for the most part, and only working together on a single job, and so there will naturally be information that they are not prepared to disclose to potential competitors. In a virtual organisation, partners need to take action based on the information they receive from other partners. This presents a problem, because the information may not be trustworthy. To increase their confidence that they are taking the right action, there are some things a partner can do. They can ask the sender for more details about the information itself, such as its source or age (known as the provenance of the information), but these details can often give away organisation or government secrets, and partners are naturally not keen to release them. They could try to verify the information themselves or via a third party, but these activities take time and in situations such as disaster response, speed is an important factor. We wish to enable a partner to increase their confidence that they are taking the right action in a virtual organisation. We will do this by providing methods and tools that help partners to choose the virtual organisation policies so that the desire for provenance data and the desire for secrecy are held in balance. We will look particularly at the provenance acquisition policy, which states what provenance information is associated with communications within the virtual organisation, and the provenance use policy, which states the action that a partner will take on receipt of information with a certain provenance associated to it. Choosing the right combination of policies here is critical to the success of a virtual organisation, and this choice must be made and re-made as the partners, trust relationships and goals of the virtual organisation change. We will build mathematical models of the policies and the virtual organisation itself, and a tool to allow partners to interact with these models (without their needing to understand the models) to predict the impact of changes to these policies in terms both of the secrecy requirements within the virtual organisation and their ability to have confidence in the information they receive. This will help in the choice of provenance policies both at the start of a virtual organisation and throughout its lifetime.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Organisation Website:	http://www.ncl.ac.uk