Utility-Based Policy Management System for Virtual Organization

Problem statement: Policy issues have become a challenge within Virtual Organizations (VOs) that integrate participants and resources, spanning multiple physical institutions. Each of the VO classes has different goals that hope to be achieved by providing policies. The main question in this regard is that "how such policies can help the entire VO participants achieve their goals". Approach: As a first step to address this question, we developed and evaluated a policy management framework within a specialized context, namely Utility based Policy Management System (U-PMS). We proposed an approach for policy federation, in which a group of VO participants agreed to adopt common standards to provide a common infrastructure that unifies the way the policies were applied in VO. Results: The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed approach was able to manage VO policies and achieve higher utility for VO participant through its management functions. It outperforms the related system by 9.99% for acceptance function and 5.77% for conflict resolution and 4.65% for policy merging. Conclusion: We observed that the utility of VO participants' can be improved through managing the applied polices in VO.