Sharing smart environment assets in dynamic multi-partner scenarios

Abstract

Accurate, reliable and actionable intelligence produced by smart environment assets is essential in order for dynamic operations such as emergency response or humanitarian relief to be effective. Leveraging Future Internet building block technologies, smart environments are ecosystems which seamlessly embed IT assets into physical world's objects that collect, process and disseminate operational data and insights. The management of smart environment assets towards an efficient collaboration in multi-partner, dynamic scenarios where assets are owned and operated by different partners is a non-trivial problem, due to partners' restrictive sharing policies. In this work we compare two asset sharing approaches; the first is based on a traditional asset ownership model, while the second novel one, is based on an edge team-based model where users are grouped into cross-partner teams and as team members they have access to assets belonging to all the partners participating in team. We further experiment with the second, unexplored team-based sharing model by testing its behavior under different user mobility patterns and extreme asset ownership models investigating its impact on MSTA-P, a policy-regulated version of an existing asset-task assignment protocol. For the protocol's evaluation we implement a multi-partner operation scenario using an open source, agent-based and discrete time simulation environment. © 2014 IEEE.