A Case Study in Composing a Trusted Distributed Real-time and Embedded (DRE) System

Trust of an enterprise distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) system indicates conformance of this system’s behavior to its published specification. As enterprise DRE systems migrate toward open-architectures that promote system design and implementation via (third-party) components and the composition of such components, it is becoming more critical to evaluate trust at multiple levels of granularity (e.g., individual components, component interactions, and component assemblies). This is because trust of an enterprise DRE system is not always equal to “summing” the trust of its individual parts. This paper provides two contributions to research on evaluating trust in DRE systems. First, this paper presents a novel trust model, called TrDRES, which is based on subjective logic and supports evaluating trust of a DRE system at multiple levels of granularity. Secondly, it presents a case study that demonstrates an application of TrDRES on an enterprise DRE system from the domain of distributed tracking. The results of our case study highlight that trustworthiness of a composed DRE system could easily be evaluated using the proposed trust composition operators as described. Keywords-trust, system composition, case study, enterprise DRE system