BREIN

BREIN addressed a number of issues acting as barriers to the adoption of Grids, Clouds and Service Oriented Architectures. The project took the concept of dynamic virtual organisations towards a more business-centric model by incorporating approaches from Artificial Intelligence and the Semantic Web.

Users need simplicity. It must not be too difficult for business to use Grids, Clouds or Service Oriented Architectures. End-users don’t want to be bothered with the business processes of making agreements, access tokens, etc; they just want to use the services. Business users need reliability. Current service provision is not reliable enough for them to trust. Service providers need assistance in planning their resourcing so that they can effectively serve their customers, and customers need assurance that the offers made by providers will be backed up with guarantees.

Photo: Flughafen Stuttgart

The project simplified the service usage process by providing a framework to let each human actor do what they are good at, and to hide complexity from the human actors. Throughout the process, we automate where possible, whilst respecting the business goals of the actors involved.

The project increased reliability through SLAs and dynamism. SLAs provide guarantees and compensation in case of failure, whilst dynamism enables customers and providers to adapt to changing situations. Dynamism is achieved through the use of Agent-based planning of resource usage.

Agent-based planning and adaptation increase reliability. The agents can interact, negotiate, plan and re-plan, thus adapting to account for dynamic changes in the situations faced by the business actors.

Semantics are fundamental to interactions and comprehension between actors and agents - finding providers, negotiating SLAs and invoking services.

Security is tightly integrated, not "bolted on". Security is tightly coupled to SLAs providing guarantees and business relationships providing roots of trust.

IT Innovation was involved in business modelling and processes, security and workflow enactment. We led the testbed deployment, where the lessons learned were evaluated.

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BREIN received research funding from the EC’s Sixth Framework Programme.