Project partners
Imperial College (Imperial)
Imperial College London enjoys a worldwide reputation as a leading centre for teaching and research in science and engineering. It is consistently recognised as one of the top three UK university institutions for research quality, has one of the largest turnovers of any UK university institutions and has numerous collaborations with industry.
The Department of Computing is one of the largest computing departments in the UK and is world renowned its work on distributed computing, logic and artificial intelligence, highperformance computing, visual information processing, computing theory, and computational aspects of management science. The Department has been awarded the top rating in each of the Research Assessment Exercises (RAEs) undertaken by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE).
The group brings considerable expertise in security and management policy specification, analysis, refinement and enforcement, distributed programming environments, and adaptable pervasive systems:
• Policy-based Adaptation and Security Management: The Ponder language for management and security policies and its associated environment have been used by a number of companies including BT, Fujitsu, Sun, IBM, Cisco and various university research groups.
• Formal Analysis: the group have developed techniques for formal analysis (including conflict detection) and refinement of policy specifications based on abductive reasoning and pattern based goal-decomposition. So far these techniques have been successfully applied to Network Quality of Service Management although their scope of applicability is far wider.
• Pervasive environments: The Self-Managed Cell (SMCs) architecture defines an extensible architectural pattern that permits the integration of a dynamic set of management services for implementing autonomous behaviour in pervasive systems. SMCs can interact in a peer-to-peer fashion or compose in larger SMCs for scale-up to larger environments.
Within Consequence, the group is therefore ideally placed to coordinate and contribute to the development of policy infrastructures (WP3) as well as address the interfaces with the enforcement environment (WP4) and with the analysis and refinement tools (WP2).
Contribution within the Consequence project :
The group brings considerable expertise in security and management policy specification, analysis, refinement and enforcement, distributed programming environments, and adaptable pervasive systems. More specifically, the following projects within Imperial College are of particular relevance to Consequence:
• Policy-based Adaptation and Security Management: The Ponder language for management and security policies and its associated environment have been used by a number of companies including BT, Fujitsu, Sun, IBM, Cisco and various university research groups. The recently developed Ponder2 (www.ponder2.net) system leverages our past experience and provides additional flexibility for policy migration and interactions, extensibility, interoperability and execution on resource-constrained devices such as mobile phones or PDAs. Ponder2 is already being used in the TrustCoM, Diadem and EMANICS EU funded projects as well as in joint work with industry.
• Formal Analysis: We have developed techniques for formal analysis (including conflict detection) and refinement of policy specifications based on abductive reasoning and pattern based goal-decomposition. So far these techniques have been successfully applied to Network Quality of Service Management although their scope of applicability is far wider.
• Pervasive environments: The Self-Managed Cell (SMCs) architecture defines an extensible architectural pattern that permits the integration of a dynamic set of management services for implementing autonomous behaviour in pervasive systems. SMCs can interact in a peer-to-peer fashion or compose in larger SMCs for scale-up to larger environments. Within Consequence, the group is therefore ideally placed to coordinate and contribute to the development of the policy infrastructure (WP3) as well as address the interfaces with the enforcement environment (WP4) and with the analysis and refinement tools (WP2).
For more details visit www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk