Start date:  01.10.2009

Funded by:  DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)

Local head of project:  Prof. Dr. Theo Ungerer

Local scientists:  Dr. Nizar Msadek

External scientists / cooperations:  

Prof. Dr. Christian Müller-Schloer
Prof. Dr. Jörg Hähner
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Reif
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André

Publications: publication list

The DFG funded research unit OC-Trust deals with the trustworthiness of Organic Computing-systems. The goal of this project is to develop processes, methods and tools to evaluate and create trust values for organic computing systems.

The project part of the Chair of Systems and Networking concerns models on component level to evaluate trust in OC systems. Our trust model, i.e., measures credibility and reliability and calculates trust values for the overall system.

• Reliability: The quality of a system to remain available even under disturbances or partial failure for a specified period of time as measured quantitatively by means of guaranteed availability, mean-time between failures, or stochastically defined performance guarantees.
• Credibility: The belief in the ability and willingness of a cooperation partner to participate in an interaction in a desirable manner. Also, the ability of a system to communicate with a user consistently and transparently.

A trust model on component level containing the before mentioned facets will be developed as proof-of-concept for OC systems. It will be implemented and evaluated in the OC middleware OCµ, thereby improving OCµ to a Trust-Enabling Middleware (TEM).

The developed trust models include trust through direct observation as well as reputation. Trust from direct observation includes all values gained by direct interactions. Contrarily reputation is gained from information of third parties when no first hand experience is available.

The additional information delivered by the trust models is used to enhance the already developed self-x algorithms to increase their quality and therefore increase the trust into the overall system.