Towards trustworthy Cyber-physical Production Systems: A dynamic agent accountability approach

Smart manufacturing is a challenging trend being fostered by the Industry 4.0 paradigm. In this scenario Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are particularly elected for modeling such types of intelligent, decentralised processes, thanks to their autonomy in pursuing collective and cooperative goals. From a human perspective, however, increasing the confidence in trustworthiness of MAS based Cyber-physical Production Systems (CPPS) remains a significant challenge. Manufacturing services must comply with strong requirements in terms of reliability, robustness and latency, and solution providers are expected to ensure that agents will operate within certain boundaries of the production, and mitigate unattended behaviours during the execution of manufacturing activities. To address this concern, a Manufacturing Agent Accountability Framework is proposed, a dynamic authorization framework that defines and enforces boundaries in which agents are freely permitted to exploit their intelligence to reach individual and collective objectives. The expected behaviour of agents is to adhere to CPPS workflows which implicitly define acceptable regions of behaviours and production feasibility. Core contributions of the proposed framework are: a manufacturing accountability model, the representation of the Leaf Diagrams for the governance of agent behavioural autonomy, and an ontology of declarative policies for the identification and avoidance of ill-intentioned behaviours in the execution of CPPS services. We outline the application of this enhanced trustworthiness framework to an agent-based manufacturing use-case for the production of a variety of hand tools.

A Spatio-Situation-Based Access Control Model for Dynamic Permission on Mobile Applications

As users are now able to take their mobile devices from location to location, there has been a transition from a static program running on a PC/laptop to a dynamic application that can adapt based on a variety of conditions and criteria. This highlights an emerging need to support dynamic permissions of mobile applications as a user moves from location to location based and perform different actions in particular situation. This chapter presents a Spatio-Situation-Based Access Control model that extends role-based access control to secure sensitive data for mobile applications with the ability to make dynamic authorization decisions according to the time/location and the particular situation being encountered by a user. To demonstrate the feasibility of the work, a realistic healthcare scenario examines the complex workflow of treating a patient by a physician utilizing a mobile health (mHealth) app to access patient data, as she/he moves among multiple locations at different times throughout the day/week requiring access to different patient data repositories at different times.