Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAIs) support service providers on the Internet in outsourcing security services. AAIs influence and change the process of e-commerce transactions on multiple points. Changes influence users, service providers, and provider federations likewise. This work analyses the alterations implied by an AAI, comparing various AAI paradigms and traditional...

Over the past years great effort went into the establishment of research infrastructures for the Humanities and Social Sciences. As a result of the diversity of their targeted research fields and communities, miscellaneous infrastructure projects have developed unique solutions for overlapping target groups. This especially holds for describing available resources by structured metadata and pro...

We live in an increasingly interconnected world of techno-social systems, in which infrastructures composed of different technological layers are interoperating within the social component that drives their use and development. Examples are provided by the Internet, the World Wide Web, WiFi communication technologies, and transportation and mobility infrastructures. The multiscale nature and co...

This study aims to develop a novel methodology to prioritize the construction of new railway infrastructures for privatization. The private sector can cooperate to solve the capacity problems of railway networks, by the construction of new infrastructure. The purpose of this study is to answer the basic question that whether the capacity problems of the railway networks can be solved simply by ...

Future infrastructures for energy, traffic, and computing will be virtualized: they will consist of decentralized, self-organizing, dynamically adaptive, and open collections of physical resources such as virtual power plants or computing clouds. Challenges to software dependability, in particular software security will be enourmous. While the problems in this domain transcend any specific inst...

Maintaining the critical infrastructures, such as Drinking Water Treatment Plants (DWTP), transportation, power generation and communications systems, in a safe state is a complex problem. The effective collaboration, as well as the collection aggregation and dissemination of early warning information among the stakeholders of the Safety Management System (SMS) responsible for the safety of the...

As large grid infrastructures, such as Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, mature, they are being used by scientists around the world in their daily work, running thousands of concurrent computational jobs and transferring large amounts of data. The successful and sustainable operation of such grid infrastructures is only possible through the use of monitoring tools. The underlying networks upon whic...

Cloud computing has undergone rapid expansion throughout the last decade. Many companies and organizations have made the transition from tra­ ditional data centers to the cloud due to its flexibility and lower cost. However, traditional data centers are still being relied upon by those who are less certain about the security of cloud. This problem is highlighted by the fact that there only exis...

Many of the current traditional system engineering (TSE) approaches for elicitation of requirements are insufficient when deployed in complex situations. TSE approach to requirement elicitation is based on assumption of stable environmental conditions. However, the elicitation of requirements for complex systems (i.e., interdependent critical infrastructures) requires innovative approaches that...

Critical infrastructures form a technological skeleton of our world by providing us with water, food, electricity, gas, transportation, communication, banking, and finance. Moreover, as urban population increases, the role of infrastructures become more vital. In this paper, we adopt a network perspective and discuss the ever growing need for fundamental interdisciplinary study of critical infr...