RBAC for Organisation and Security in an Agent Coordination Infrastructure

More and more the engineering of complex agent-based systems calls for infrastructural support for coordination and security issues integrated with services for the description and management of system organisation. This trend is evident in the state-of-the-art models adopted for the management of security and organisation of complex information systems: in this context Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) models are emerging as a reference architecture for integrating security issues — access control in particular — and (role-based) organisation management. In this paper we discuss how an RBAC-like model has been fruitfully exploited to extend an infrastructure for the coordination of agent-based systems — TuCSoN — with the support for organisation and security management, in particular as far as access control is concerned.