Modeling Trust Relationships in Collaborative Engineering Projects

Engineering projects may involve the efforts of specific partners experts in various disciplines. Grid and Web service technologies enable engineering project teams to perform resource discovery, selection, negotiation, and composition in a networked environment. However, the need arises for trust relationships, allowing team entities to participate in the project under security guarantees of privacy, of authorized disclosure of project data, and of correct users’ credential management. This paper proposes a Web service based framework to support this process. Giving prominence to the needs of a secure and dynamic collaboration in the style of a Virtual Organization (VO), the paper identifies and models the trust aspects featuring actors and objects involved in engineering team collaborations. An architecture is illustrated, centered around a Security Manager component supporting security in the composition and execution of distributed engineering services. A prototype implementation is presented.