DIMACS Working Group Meeting on Policy Driven Decision Making and Dynamic Interoperability

December 8, 2000
DIMACS Center, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

Organizers:
Tom Buckman, MITRE Corporation, buckmant@mitre.org
Joan Feigenbaum, Yale University, jf@cs.yale.edu
Fred Roberts, Rutgers University, froberts@dimacs.rutgers.edu
Presented under the auspices of the Special Year on Next Generation Networks Technologies and Applications.

Co-sponsored by DIMACS, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

Modern military operations emphasize a need to be able to rapidly assemble multiservice, multination, coalitions. The modern, high speed, high tech information based economy has put a premium on the ability of companies to partner rapidly in joint ventures. This has led to a requirement for services and nations or corporations to quickly interface operational processes and federate supporting communication and information systems, in order to meet mission objectives. This calls for a new approach to achieving interoperability, one that emphasizes the ability of operational units and their supporting information systems to adapt to unanticipated changes in operational requirements that occur during the execution of a mission or that occur in the context of new joint ventures.

In order to respond to unanticipated changes in requirements, it will be necessary to rapidly translate policy decisions generated by mission commanders, senior executives, system operators, security authorities and others into coherent sets of commands or protocols that can be used directly by supporting information systems to reconfigure themselves to satisfy these policy requirements.

The objective of this initial working group meeting is to explore previous work done by theoretical computer scientists in the area of policy driven decision-making and its potential application to solving problems associated with enabling dynamic interoperability. It is thought that previous work done in this area related to scenarios, in which mutually distrustful (or partially distrustful) parties wish to perform a security-critical joint action, may apply.

The working group meeting will conclude with a roundtable discussion on ideas presented during the course of the day. The discussion will focus on identifying areas for further research which could serve as a focal point for a follow-on workshop and working group meeting to be held within the following twelve months.


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Document last modified on October 30, 2000.