Permission and Authorization in Policies for Virtual Communities of Agents

We study the design of policies for virtual communities of agents based on peer-to-peer systems or the grid infrastructure. In a virtual community agents can play both the role of resource consumers and the role of resource providers. Moreover, the agents remain in control of their resources, and therefore we distinguish between the authorization to access a resource given by the virtual community and the permission to do so issued by the resource providers. We propose a logical multiagent framework for virtual communities that distinguishes three roles: resource consumption, provision, as well as authorization.