Introduction to Collaborative Technology for Coordinating Crisis Management (CT2CM) track

International audienceThis is the foreword introduction to the special Wetice Track about Coordination in Crisis Management and its support technology

Keynote : From group collaboration to large scale social collaboration

International audience25th years of evolution in collaborative technologies During the last 25th years, we have witnessed huge evolutions of technologies to support collaborative activities between people and between organisations. Since Doug Engelbart “Mother of all demos” in 1968, most of our dreams have come true regarding group support for collaboration, mobile and ubiquitous communication, and data sharing. We are now connected to anyone at anytime from almost anywhere and we can coordinate actions and share data to achieve common goals. In this talk, we will recall how a combination of advances in science and technologies, together with their appropriation by users, have created an exciting and unexpected landscape for collaboration. We will show how this landscape is still evolving under important tectonic forces driven by new discoveries, artefacts and usage. Although it is a risky exercise, we will try to draw some lines to the future to describe the evolution that is currently occurring in this area and how we expect to see them heading in the future : as an ubiquitous collaborative Web based platform where communities of people can collaborate confidently, as a system without central authority where they can meet, as a platform where they can share and coordinate their action to resolve the big issues of our time

Coordination of Distributed Collaborative Activities for Disaster Management

International audienceIt is very challenging for different organizations to coordinate together in dynamic situations like a disaster response. Each organization is autonomous and considers the situation from their point of view. There is no central authority to coordinate all operations. To coordinate their actions, organizations need to exchange information on what they are doing. However, they cannot share everything with everybody due to privacy, regulatory or strategic reasons. Currently, they only use e-mail, telephone or fax to exchange information. Thus, it is very difficult for them to detect and handle differences on their perception of the situation. We propose an approach for inter-organizational process management suited to these dynamic scenarios. It allows different organizations to share selected activities by replicating them optimistically in each other workspaces. The underlying system propagate the state changes to all workspace eventually. We explain detecting and handling of two different types of conflicts that can occur in this setting. We provide an implementation and explain how we have derived a first evaluation of the syste

Task Delegation Based Access Control Models for Workflow Systems

International audiencee-Government organisations are facilitated and conducted using workflow management systems. Role-based access control (RBAC) is recognised as an efficient access control model for large organisations. The application of RBAC in workflow systems cannot, however, grant permissions to users dynamically while business processes are being executed. We currently observe a move away from predefined strict workflow modelling towards approaches supporting flexibility on the organisational level. One specific approach is that of task delegation. Task delegation is a mechanism that supports organisational flexibility, and ensures delegation of authority in access control systems. In this paper, we propose a Task-oriented Access Control (TAC) model based on RBAC to address these requirements. We aim to reason about task from organisational perspectives and resources perspectives to analyse and specify authorisation constraints. Moreover, we present a fine grained access control protocol to support delegation based on the TAC model

Design of a Collaborative Disaster Response Process Management System

International audienceWe describe in this article a framework for disaster response process management. This framework can be used to develop information systems sup- porting those processes. It is grounded in several research approaches: literature research, case studies, end user interviews and workshops. We compare disaster response process management with business process management and argue why it is substantial different to it. Another main result of this comparison is that busi- ness process management technology, such as flexible workflow systems, are not suitable for disaster response processes. We propose an information system sup- porting disaster response processes based on our developed framework. Finally we present validation of the information system design and give outlook on our future research

Une Approche Dynamique pour la Gestion des Politiques de Délégation dans les Systèmes de Contrôle d´Accès

National audienceLa délégation de tâche est un mécanisme qui permet d'obtenir une certaine flexibilité organisationnelle dans un système de gestion de workflow. Il permet également d'assurer une forme de délégation des autorisations dans un système de contrôle d'accès. Dans cet article, nous définissons une approche qui permet la délégation dynamique d'autorité dans un environnement de contrôle d'accès. La nouveauté consiste à raisonner sur les autorisation en fonction des évènements de délégation de tâche et de spécifier ces autorisations en terme de politiques de délégation. Lorsqu'un évènement de délégation est produit, la politique d'autorisation peut changer proactivement pour refléter les changements induits par la délégation d'autorité. Les travaux existants sur les systèmes de contrôle d'accès ne considèrent pas cette perspective. Nous montrerons ces limitations et proposons un cadre pour la délégation de tâche qui supporte la mise en place et le contrôle de politiques de délégation

Optimization of Orchestration of Geocrowdsourcing Activities

International audienceGeocrowdsourcing has proved to be very valuable in crisis situations. Calling to citizen on the ground or to experts or trained amateurs to help in the mapping of crisis situation is a recognized and valuable practice. However, despite the experience gained from real and dramatic situations, it remains difficult to set up and execute complex processes that require actions of both people on the ground and people on the web, and to understand how to get the best result at the minimal cost in term of users actions. In this paper, we describe a process that can be used to assess a global situation on a map using a combination of services and user operations. We want to understand how best to distribute a limited amount of human actions between different kind of tasks in order to get the most reliable result. Since it is difficult to conduct experimentation, we have decided to use simulation to reach a result that could be applied on the ground. This simulation relies on a geolocalised corpus of tweets. It provides some hints about how to deploy an exercise on the ground that are discussed as a conclusion. In addition, we propose a binary integer programming (BIP) making best use of the available workers

Securing IoT-based Groups: Efficient, Scalable and Fault-tolerant Key Management Protocol

International audienceGroup key management protocols are crucial in establishing secured communication channels for collaborative IoT-based groups. The Internet of Things (IoT) dimension includes additional challenges. In fact, resource constrained members within dynamic and heterogeneous groups are unable to run existing group key protocols. Furthermore, these protocols need to be scalable and fault tolerant to suit growing and sensitive groups. To face these issues, we enhance our previously proposed protocol called Decentralized Batch-based Group Key protocol (DBGK). Using polynomial computation to secure data exchanges, we considerably improve its scalability, fault tolerance and collusion freeness properties. This gain is achieved thanks to the ability to include additional unconstrained members (controllers) while inducing a very limited cost on the constrained members. Furthermore, we include an energy preserving blockchain-based mechanism to authenticate group members credentials in a distributed manner. To assess our new protocol called DiStributed Batch-based Group Key protocol (DsBGK), we performed a detailed theoretical security analysis to evaluate its behaviour against well studied attacks in the literature. Furthermore, we validated this analysis using a formal validation tool. To evaluate DsBGK performances , we performed extensive simulations. We proceeded by comparing DsBGK in term of energy cost, first, with DBGK, then with other analogous protocols from the literature. The results confirmed the security soundness of DsBGK, in addition to an improved energy efficiency compared to its peers

Optimisation of business process tenant distribution in the Cloud with a genetic algorithm

With the generalization of the Cloud, software providers can distribute their software as a service without investing in large infrastructure. However, without an effective resource allocation method, their operation cost can grow quickly, hindering the profitability of the service. This is the case for BPM as a Service providers that want to handle hundreds of customers with a given quality of service. Since there are variations in the capacity and the number of users, the allocation method must be able to adjust the resource and the allocation of customer on these resources. In this paper we present a cost optimization model and a heuristic based on genetic algorithms to adjust resource allocation to the need of a set of customers with varying BPM task throughput. Experi-mentations using realistic customer loads and cloud resources capacities shows the gain of this method compared to previous approaches

Handling Conflicts in Autonomous Coordination of Distributed Collaborative Activities

International audienceCoordination between different organizations in dynamic situations, such as a disaster response, is challenging. Organizations are autonomous and coordinate the situation from their point of view. There is no central authority to coordinate all operations. To coordinate their actions, organi- zations need to exchange information on what they are doing. However, they cannot share everything with everybody due to privacy, regulatory or strategic reasons. Currently, only e-mail, telephone or fax are used to exchange information. This makes detecting and handling of conflicting views on the situation very difficult. We propose an approach for inter-organizational pro- cess management for these kinds of dynamic scenarios. It allows different organizations to share selected activities by replicating them in the different workspaces of the organizations. State changes of shared activities are propagated optimistically. We explain detecting and handling of two different types of conflicts that can occur in this setting. We provide an implementation and interviews to validate the concept