Coalition Environment Research Articles

Systems Integration in Military Environment

The article highlights the major concepts of systems integration in a military environment, especially the NATO Network Enabled Capability and Federal Mission Networking. Both concepts were implemented into the Czech Armed Forces and adapted to fit their ambitions, possibilities, tasks and specific goals. The primary goal of this adoption was to achieve the capabilities to work in a coalition environment. The experiences from Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance integration projects are presented in the second part of the article. After assessing the current state, development goals are characterized as challenges that need to be addressed with a solution that is described.

BCON: Blockchain based access CONtrol across multiple conflict of interest domains

In today's on-demand computing and virtual coalition environment, cross-domain services are acquired and provided. These business domains may belong to either the same or different conflict of interest system. “Transitive access” can cause leakage of information between competitors through some other conflict of interest system's member. Therefore, a secure access control mechanism is required to detect and deny “transitive access” efficiently with minimal trust in externalist. Existing access control mechanisms focused on either single or multiple conflict of interest domains but with no “transitive access”. In addition, these existing mechanisms are centralized with inherited unfair access control and are a single point of failure. Blockchain (BC) is a shared digital ledger encompassing a list of connected blocks stored on a decentralized distributed network that is secured through cryptography. We propose a BC based access control for conflict of interest domains. We have integrated a BC in our architecture to make access control fair, verifiable and decentralized. Users access histories and “transitive accesses” are stored on BC ledger. We propose a novel mechanism called “Transitive Access Checking and Enforcement (TACE)” i.e., “Algorithm.1”. It makes an authorization decision based on BC endorsement that “transitive access” will not occur. “Algorithm.2” verifies and updates users access histories stored at BC before each request approval. Similarly, “Algorithm.3” detects possible future “transitive accesses” and updates Transitive Access Set (TAS) stored at BC after each request approval. The Simple Promela Interpreter (SPIN) model checker is used to verify the proposed mechanisms for “transitive access” detection and prevention. We have identified four conflicting sequences of execution that can cause “transitive access”. Results show that the proposed mechanism is safe against “transitive access” by checking all the four possible conflicting sequences of execution.

Resource management policies to increase provider's gain in a cloud coalition

Cloud computing is a new trend after grids. The resource allocation in such dynamic environments presents numerous challenges. Unfortunately, the maximisation of accepted user's requests and at the same time the reduction of provider's costs are a conflicting problem. In this paper, we propose an agent-based mechanism to automatically manage cloud resources in order to simultaneously achieve the maximum of accepted requests with minimum cost and to reduce as much as possible the amount of energy consumption. We present new strategies that help in the decision-making process. These strategies increase provider's profit forming or leaving coalitions, accepting or rejecting an offer and calculating the cloud trust. Finally, this paper presents a case study to illustrate our resource management mechanism in cloud computing. Also, simulation results indicate that the proposed policies enhance the provider's profit, and give a smaller number of rejected virtual machines requests in the coalition environment.

Research of Access Control Models in Personal Networks

How to prevent illegal users from sharing system resources was one of the main purposes for MAGNET Security Group. This paper introduced some major access control models such as traditional access control models, role-based access control model (RBAC), task-based access control model (TBAC) and role-task-based access control model (T-RBAC). In the end, a feasible scheme PN_T-RBAC was proposed at the base of the T-RBAC model in existence, which was suitable for the coalition environment of personal networks.

Lib‐Labism in 2015: The prospects for a radical coalition

Former Coalition environment secretary Chris Huhne surveys the policy landscape and sets out the potential basis for an historic radical progressive coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats 2015.

Knowledge-Based Approaches to Information Management in Coalition Environments

The community of interest information-sharing model lets coalition partners publish and disseminate data in a controlled fashion. In this vein, the authors have extended the Phoenix information management system to improve document selection and filtering.

Quantifying event correlations for proactive failure management in networked computing systems

Networked computing systems continue to grow in scale and in the complexity of their components and interactions. Component failures become norms instead of exceptions in these environments. Moreover, failure events exhibit strong correlations in the time and space domains. In this paper, we develop a spherical covariance model with an adjustable timescale parameter to quantify the temporal correlation and a stochastic model to characterize spatial correlation. The models are further extended to take into account the information of application allocation to discover more correlations among failure instances. We cluster failure events based on their correlations and predict their future occurrences. Experimental results on a production coalition system, the Wayne State Computational Grid, show the offline and online predictions made by our predicting system can forecast 72.7–85.3% of the failure occurrences and capture failure correlations in a cluster coalition environment.

Interoperability Maneuver the Enterprise's Dimensions with ERP System

Narrowing the gap between cutting-edge technology and its applications, as well as identifying the missing links for applying technology will be the ongoing challenge. The rudimentary scope, goals, and objectives of the community have not changed radically the challenges of technology, because the present juncture is superior than prior to. State-of-the-art new-fangled technology like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) System has undergone an approximately puzzling transformation, corresponding to the evolution of information technology. Within a generation, information technology has transformed the everyday tasks of the workforce-computer use has infiltrated almost ubiquitously. Interoperability operates two dimensions: organizational dimensions and time dimensions. Here & now interoperability across organization boundaries with its diverse communication devices is ultimately achieved through ERP system software. The ERP is one significant approach to accomplish more with less. It is an established move toward to creating tangible savings from greater speed, abridged processing, eliminating redundant effort procedures, and better accountability in programs and services. This paper addresses the important role for ensuring system interoperability in an ERP system centric coalition environment. The endeavor of this paper is to identify a problem and suggest a solution, recommend formulation of interoperability as a solution and thrash out implications. The paper makes an effort to recommend that interoperability is a real-valued element that applies to an ample range of relationships among ERP system processing entities. The paper also in brief documents the state-of-the-practice in information systems and technologies, as well as the developing role of information technology (IT). Thus the final motive of the paper is to present the key business issues concerning interoperability connection with ERP Systems standards with a sight to developing sustainable solutions beneficial to all the organizations.

CREATIVE AND TAILORED STRATEGIES NEEDED TO FOSTER RESEARCHER-COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

The strategies put forth by Christopher et al.1 are consistent with the experience of HIV researchers who are part of the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions. These researchers (including us) have been working for more than 5 years in 13 urban areas across the United States and in Puerto Rico to help create and sustain local coalitions focused on HIV structural change strategies.2 We've found that having defined research parameters does not preclude building trusting and sustaining relationships with community members, as long as flexibility and transparency are employed. Researchers must be clear about the requirements versus areas of flexibility. In addition, researchers must allow opportunity for partners to lead in meaningful ways. Based on our experience so far, here are some additional strategies to consider: First, find ways to support community partners’ institutional needs. Before ever asking partners for their time, we provided them with several resources, including a community-wide resource directory of youth health services, as well as maps depicting local HIV and sexually transmitted disease prevalence, and results from interviews with local youth regarding their risk behaviors, which support grant writing. It is critical to become an honest broker that can help partners gain the resources that they need to prosper. For example, connect a partner who is looking for “people power” to another organization that has volunteers ready to staff community events. In addition, allow time at each coalition meeting for partners to discuss their assets and needs. Foster an environment where partners feel comfortable requesting assistance from one another and exchanging resources. Second, use an outside facilitator to help define the course of work for the coalition. In our case, this meant having a facilitator—who was chosen by researchers and partners—lead a strategic planning session whereby the goals and objectives of the coalition were identified. This helped build trust by keeping the planning process open. Third, maintain regular and ongoing communication, preferably face-to-face, with key managers and supervisors from partner organizations, even if those individuals do not regularly attend coalition meetings. Ensure that high-level staff has a clear understanding of the coalition's work. In our experience, this helps to facilitate a productive and trusting coalition environment, because coalition members are more likely to be active participants. In general, building trust between researchers and community members requires multifaceted and creative approaches. Strategies must be tailored, and researchers must be committed over the long haul.

The Challenge of Ethical Relativism in a Coalition Environment

This paper explores the practical ethical challenges faced by a military commander in a coalition environment when that partner does not appear to share the same ethical values. Should one intervene? If one accepts that ethical standards are not absolute, does one have any kind of justification in interfering in such a situation? The implications and validity of ethical relativism are explored and challenged and then a framework is proposed to allow a structured approach to decision-making in such situations that balances considerations of the specific act against the implications in a broader context. Such a framework can be used whether or not ethical relativism is accepted as a valid explanation.

The 1996 Election: How the Coalition Won the Environment Debate.

This monograph outlines in detail the development of the Liberal-National Coalition's environment policy in the lead up to the 1996 Australian Federal Election.

A decentralized execution model for inter-organizational workflows

Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) are often used to support the automated execution of business processes. In today's networked environment, it is not uncommon for organizations representing different business partners to collaborate for providing value-added services and products. As such, workflows representing the business processes in this loosely-coupled, dynamic and ad hoc coalition environment tend to span across the organizational boundaries. As a result, it is not viable to employ a single centralized WFMS to control the execution of the inter-organizational workflow due to limited scalability, availability and performance. To this end, in this paper, we present a decentralized workflow model, where inter-task dependencies are enforced without requiring to have a centralized WFMS. In our model, a workflow is divided into partitions called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called the workflow stub, located at each organization. We present a performance study by considering different types of workflows with varying degrees of parallelism. Our performance results indicate that decentralized workflow management indeed enjoys significant gain in performance over its centralized counterpart in cases where there is less parallelism.

Coordinated access control with temporal and spatial constraints on mobile execution in coalition environments

Dynamics is an inherent characteristic of computational grids. The volatile nodal availablity requires grid applications and services be adaptive to changes of the underlying grid topology. Mobile execution allows mobile users or tasks to relocate across different nodes in the grid. This poses new challenges to resource access control. Resource sharing in the grid coalition environment creates certain temporal and spatial requirements for accesses by mobile entities. However, there is a lack of formal treatment of the impact of mobility on the shared resource access control. In this paper, we formalize the mobile execution of grid entities by using the mobile code model. We introduce a shared resource access language, SRAL, to model the behaviors of mobile codes. SRAL is structured and composed so that the program of a mobile code can be constructed recursively from primitive accesses. We define the operational semantics of SRAL and prove that it is expressive enough for most resource access patterns. In particular, it is complete in the sense that it can specify any program of regular trace model. A constraint language, SRAC, is defined to specify spatial constraints for shared resource accesses. Checking if the behavior of a mobile code satisfies a given spatial constraint can be solved by a polynomial-time algorithm. We apply the Duration Calculus to express temporal constraints, and show the constraint satisfaction problem is decidable as well. We extend the role-based access control model to specify and enforce our spatio-temporal constraints. To prove the concept and technical feasibility of our coordinated access control model, we implemented it in a mobile agent system, which emulates mobile execution in grids by software agents.

Dynamic Policy-Based Network Management for a Secure Coalition Environment

This article reports the latest results of an R&D effort to develop a prototype implementation of a dynamic policy-based network management (PBNM) system that can be used to configure and manage a secure network for a coalition environment across an unsecured wide area network. The prototype, based on a distributed architecture, includes capabilities for policy creation and management, dynamic policy negotiation, and dynamic policy provisioning. The policy negotiation facilitates the rapid deployment of a coalition network while the dynamic policy provisioning automates the configuration and management of network services including firewalls, virtual private network connections, routing, quality of service (QoS), and domain name services. Such a PBNM system enhances an organization's ability to react to network incidents identified by a network situational awareness assessment. Although the focus of the current research is a military coalition environment, the system can be used in any distributed enterprise or collaborative environment

The Calibration of Situation Awareness and Confidence Within a Multinational Operational Net Assessment

Individuals from 5 countries participated in an experiment to examine the effect of an operational net assessment (ONA) multinational information sharing (MNIS) procedure on coalition conflict resolution within a hypothetical precrisis situation. This article reports the findings for the effect of an ONA MNIS on situation awareness (SA) and the calibration of SA and confidence. In general, the findings revealed that the ONA MNIS procedure used in this experiment facilitated shared SA among the coalition teams. Although the participants were generally well calibrated, there was a trend toward overconfidence in their SA responses. These findings are discussed within the context of current and future multinational coalition environments.

A column generation approach to the coalition formation problem in multi-agent systems

The goal of this paper is to provide a computational study of the coalition formation problem in multi-agent systems. The coalition formation problem, as formulated here, is based on social welfare maximizing criteria, which aims to increase the total value of coalition structures in a multi-agent system. Value of each coalition depends only on the participating members. Pairwise relationships of coalition members determine the value of a coalition. In this study, the problem is formulated as a set partitioning problem and a column generation approach is proposed to solve it. Assuming that the coalition forming agents have computational capabilities, the algorithm is also extended to a parallel algorithm where all agents share the computational burden of coming up with a coalition. The proposed algorithms are implemented and tested in three types of environments, where expected pairwise relationship values are positive, zero or negative. Based on the test results, we highlight the coalition environments where parallel column generation technique is viable.

C4ISR Architectural Frameworks in Coalition Environments

Abstract : The break-up of the Soviet Union unleashed a flood of nationalism throughout Southeastern Europe (SEE). Freed from the yoke of suppression, the nations of the region sought economic stability and security in a dramatically changing global environment. These nations are anxious to display Western leanings and to ensure national security through multinational regional coalitions. These coalitions, in turn, are being supported by a variety of national, NATO, and U.S. sponsored initiatives with the common goal of regional stability. Within the regions of the Pacific Rim, similar coalitions may emerge with similar goals to which the principles set forth in this paper will equally apply. The common thread through these SEE initiatives is the use of Information Technology (IT) to improve Command, Control, and Communications (C3) in a combined military/peace support domain. This paper proposes an IT-driven Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Architectural Framework approach to the integration of combat and peace support forces in regional coalition initiatives. Although the framework is applicable across the total C4ISR domain, only Command, Control, and Communications are relevant to the subject addressed in this paper and will be the term used throughout. Computers are assumed as a logical part of C3. This paper also proposes that this type of architectural approach is applicable to regional coalitions on a global basis.

Zionism and the foundations of Israeli diplomacy

by Sasson Sofer. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 449 pp. $59.95 (c).Theodor Herzl enjoys a well-deserved reputation for prescience. One of his works, Altneuland, anticipated a characteristic that is vital for understanding contemporary Israeli politics: even though the Jewish state is a new country its politics are not. How old they are is a matter for debate. Whether or not one finds the antecedents of the Israeli political process in the Bible, there can be no doubt that governing after 1948 was in many respects a continuation of processes that became well established during the Mandate period. Among the areas of continuity was ideology. Indeed the emergence of the various Zionist ideologies goes back to the very early days of the Zionist movement. However, until the creation of the Mandate, these ideological positions did not have to be tested against the realities of life in Palestine. The encounters with the real world in Eretz Yisrael between 1920 and 1948 led to substantial changes in the various ideologies, often accompanied by organizational ruptures and mergers, not to mention the solidification of intense antagonisms among many of the protagonists. There were only about 600,000 Jews in Palestine in 1948 and far fewer at the beginning of the Mandate. It is truly amazing that such a small community could generate such variegated and intense ideological positions as the Yishuv did. It is even more amazing that Israel has been able to function politically with any degree of unity in light of that history of multiple divisions. The challenge to diplomats to represent such a country has been a mighty one. Even more difficult has been the task of government leaders, who have had to fashion foreign policies in a coalition environment that has often reflected the intellectually competitive atmosphere of a Zionist Congress.Sasson Sofer thoroughly examines the ideological varieties during the years before statehood while focusing on the development of a diplomatic tradition. Even though his main interest is foreign policy, his discussion necessarily deals primarily with the meaning of Zionism for the various groups, how they relate to Jewish history, the personalities identified with each of the positions, and the organizational machinations associated with the various groups. His approach differs from that used in other works on Zionist ideology, such as those by Arthur Hertzberg and Shlomo Avineri, in that he does not examine a limited number of thinkers in some depth but rather tries to identify nearly everyone who exercised some ideological leadership and gives at least a brief summary of their ideas. Moreover he incorporates political leaders who were not necessarily innovative ideologically and tries to explain how the various organizational schisms and amalgamations occurred. Thus he has produced a rich ideological history of the Yishuv, one that ends in 1948 despite a concluding chapter in which he attempts to relate his study to the unfolding events of the subsequent 50 years.The book is certainly a learned analysis of the various positions. Sorer systematically goes through every conceivable ideological position, to the extent that he even offers chapters on such diverse groupings as Lehi, the Communists, the farmers and Sephardi notables, and Canaanites and Semites. Naturally all of the more consequential groups are included as well. The problem is that most of the groups that he identifies have had little if any impact on Israeli diplomacy. Arguably he should have devoted more attention to those groups that have been prominent in government and less to the groups that have not. One gets the impression that Sorer wrote the book that he wanted to write but that the title is not very descriptive. …