VOMES: a virtual organisation membership evaluation system

Abstract

A grid supports geographically distributed resource sharing among multiple organisations, which can be considered as a special type of virtual organisations (VO). A cyberinfrastructure (CI) environment supports formation and management of multiple such VOs to meet various computing demands for researchers and scientists in different areas. 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, 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. VOMES can automatically help members in a CI environment establish and maintain VOs with high trust levels.