Vomes: a Virtual Organization Membership Evaluation System

A grid supports geographically distributed sharing of CPUs, storage and network resources among multiple organizations, which can be considered as a special type of Virtual Organizations (VO) consisting of resources and users. A CyberInfrastructure (CI) environment supports formation and management of multiple such VOs to meet various computing demands for researchers and scientists in different areas. A VO can be founded for a certain scientific collaboration so that a trust domain can be established to aggregate and manage appropriate resources and users. How to found a trustable VO and aggregate reliable resources and users for the cross-domain collaboration in a CI becomes an important issue. In this work, we provide detailed comparison of trust management in three different types of virtual communities: e-commerce, peer-to-peer (P2P) and grid environments. A VO Membership Evaluation System (VOMES) is proposed to address this new challenge brought by the CI environment. VOMES includes a layered reputation system and a committee based decision-making method to verify a new applicant to a VO and maintain corresponding VO trust levels. Simulation results show that our reputation system is accurate, robust and stable. The committee based fuzzy decision-making method can also be used to identify malicious members from reliable ones. VOMES can automatically help members in a CI environment establish and maintain VOs with high trust levels.