Defense committee: Dr. Naftaly Minsky (Chair), Dr. Alex Borgida (Co-advisor), Dr. Marvin Paull, Dr. Richard Scherl, Monmouth University

Abstract:

We address certain issues that arise in modern enterprise information systems. In such systems, the presence of goods, funds, and services is represented electronically, and their handling is carried out through acting on such electronic representation. Moreover, it is increasingly common for electronic agents (e.g., stock-trading agents) to initiate such actions autonomously. Consequently, the behavior of such systems tends to be quite invisible, and carried out in enormous speed, making it difficult to control and to audit.

To handle this problem, we introduce a regulatory regime that combines enterprise-wide policies with flexible managerial controls. And we show the effectiveness of such controls over a wide spectrum of managerial styles.

Next, we address the problem of exceptions and faults that might occur in open distributed systems, such as enterprise information systems. The problem here is different, and considerably more complex, than the problem of exceptions in programming languages, and it does not lend itself to conventional techniques of fault tolerance, which are concerned mostly with hardware faults.

Our treatment of both problems utilizes a scalable coordination and control mechanism for distributed systems, called law-governed interaction (LGI), as the underlying computational basis.