GOLD
Grid-Based Information Models to Support the Rapid Innovation of New High Value-Added Chemicals
Rob Smith
Technical Director, NEReSC
www.neresc.ac.uk
Background
• Started 1st February
• “Fundamental technology supporting highly-dynamic virtual organisations
throughout their entire lifecycle”
• Important success factors:
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Flexibility
Dynamism
Scalability
Adaptability
Management of VOs and their projects from conception to completion
• Strong business focus
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Addressing fundamental and practical issues
Making VOs work for industry
Requirements led by industrial partners
www.neresc.ac.uk
Background
• GOLD focuses on the speciality, agrochemical and pharmaceuticals sector
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Large sector of chemicals industry with $9-12bn share of $250bn global market
• This sector had traditional strengths:
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Skilled practitioners and unique chemicals expertise
• High barrier to new entrants
• Higher margins on specialities
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Highly-efficient plant and good reputation
• Deterrent to competitors
• Competitors eventually catch up
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Cheap labour/plant reduces overall price to market
Skill and efficiency become less important as success factors
• Firms must innovate to maintain advantage
www.neresc.ac.uk
Background
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Solution: business intensification
Time compression
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Managed information flow ensures the R&D
function is fully integrated into the business
operation
Facilitate partnerships
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Commercialise innovations faster than
competitors
Reduce the cost of product development
Effective information processing across full
lifecycles
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Basic
Research
9%
Outsourced R&D labs, safety assessment,
chemical analysis, data analysis, pilot studies,
manufacturing, marketing and distribution
To achieve this: create agile highly
dynamic virtual organisations
www.neresc.ac.uk
Chemical R&D Funds
Applied
Research
32%
Development
59%
Reduction in red section critical
to success
Virtual organisations
• A set of organisations and resources connected by transitory
business processes and sharing minimal infrastructure
• Business processes are the interactions between organisations and
resources
• Infrastructure could include:
• Technical, contractual, procedural, cultural, etc.
• VOs are expected to be highly dynamic, frequently changing
members, resources, business processes, Infrastructure components,
etc.
• The pressing need to embrace and manage change lies at
the heart of GOLD
www.neresc.ac.uk
VOs and business intensification
• Parallelism
• Freed from physical constraints (people, plant etc.)
• Can engage partners to carry out tasks in parallel
• Could engage several sets of resources on the same problem
• Agility
• Easier to deploy new resources to attend to problems, speculations, etc.
• e.g. unexpected by-products of chemical processes
• Cost
• Pay for resources on-demand
• Opportunity to take advantage of economies of scale
• Resources freed for other activities
• Risk
• Flexibility can reduce risk and optimise response to risk
• Reduced up-front expenditure
• Lower contractual/procedural/etc. set-up time
• Reduction in time to market
www.neresc.ac.uk
VOs – potential difficulties
• Scalability
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Increased management overhead limits
• Security
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Access to resources – perhaps to competitors
Highly integrated VOs have additional security risks
• Trust
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Particularly business-level trust
Anonymity of partners
Transitive relationships/transactions
• Information management
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Monitoring
Control
No single coordination role
www.neresc.ac.uk
Construction
Domain Independent Access Services
Metadata
Provenance
Organisation
Schema Independent Access Services
Query
Update
Notification
Data Models
Relational
XML
RDF
Data Storage (Distributed)
DBMS
DBMS
DBMS
Active information management
Naming & Location
• VO management
Chem Eng
Security
Information existing in various different sources
No single coordination role
Domain Dependent Access Services
Schema : Gold + Domain
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Scalability: traditional vs virtual
GOLD
• Middleware to support highly dynamic VOs through their full
lifecycle
• Look at the practical issues of deploying VOs
• Take requirements from industry, deliver to industry
• Focus on:
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WP1: Cultural and management implications
WP2: Full lifecycle management
WP3: Information management
WP4: Trust
WP5: Security
WP6: Demo (chemicals industry)
Additional demos? (Construction? Supply chain? Biotech?)
www.neresc.ac.uk
Current integration approach
Applications
Applications
•Connections between
organisations generally
hard-wired
•They cross levels
•They are often
unmanaged:
Business logic
•Inflexible
Resource integration
Resources
Resource integration
•Unmaintainable
•Fragile
•Static
•High level of integration
but depends on much
shared infrastructure
www.neresc.ac.uk
Towards VOs: information management
Trust
infrastructure
Applications
Security
infrastructure
Applications
Information management
•Data access and integration
•Information model
•Notification
•Service discovery
Workflow
Business logic
Distributed repository with
semantic service descriptions
Information model
Resource integration
Resource integration
Leverage database facilities
where possible (e.g. triggers),
write wrappers where not
www.neresc.ac.uk
Towards VOs: workflow
Trust
infrastructure
Applications
Security
infrastructure
Applications
•Highly dynamic
•Late binding
•Configurable at
runtime
Workflow
•Workflows represent interorganisation business
processes
Business logic
Information model
Resource integration
Workflow
•Distributed (with
transactional and audit
properties)
Resource integration
•They wrap up business
logic and information
components
•Well-defined, managed
lifecycle, embracing change
www.neresc.ac.uk
Towards VOs: security
Trust
infrastructure
Applications
Security
infrastructure
Applications
•Coordination of tokens,
identities, capabilities,
rights etc. must take
place across the entire
VO
Business logic
•Highly configurable and
dynamic
Information model
www.neresc.ac.uk
•Distributed but
coordinated
•Local administrators
control security of their
resources, but:
Workflow
Resource integration
Security
Resource integration
•Based around
distributed access
control mechanism
(RBAC/TBAC)
Towards VOs: trust
Trust
infrastructure
Applications
Security
infrastructure
Applications
Trust
•Distributed contract
management
•Non-repudiable audit trails
•Dynamic organisationand individual-level trust
policies
Workflow
Business logic
Information model
Resource integration
Resource integration
Contract infrastructure
electronically specifies rights
and obligations of each party
for automatic conflict resolution
and rapid negotiation
www.neresc.ac.uk
Business focus
• Requirements originating in industry
• Lancaster Management School
• Chemicals industry
• Demonstrator industry focussed and part of the iterative
design process
• Feedback from companies driving further design
www.neresc.ac.uk
What do we want to learn from other projects?
Mygrid workflow
GOLD
gridMIST workflow
OGSA DAI
Mygrid notification
Mygrid info model
• Security requirements of all projects
• Feed into STF
• Trust requirements of all projects
• Industrial requirements/perspectives
• PM experiences/lessons learned
www.neresc.ac.uk
The team
• North-East Regional e-Science Centre and School of Computing Science
(Newcastle University)
• School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials (Newcastle
University)
• School of Management (Lancaster University)
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SOCSA (Specialist Organic Chemicals Sector Association)
Unisys
Britest
One North East Centres of Excellence
CPACT
INSIGHT Faraday Partnership
www.neresc.ac.uk