Today’s rapidly developing communication technologies and dynamic collaborative business models made the security of data and resources more crucial than ever especially in multidomain environments like Cloud and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). It enforced the research community to develop enhanced access control techniques and models for resources across multi-domain distributed environments so that the security requirements of all participating organizations can be fulfilled through considering dynamicity of changing environments and versatility of access control policies. The popularity of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model is irrefutable because of low administrative overhead and large-scale implementation in business organizations. However, it does not incorporate the dynamically changing policies and lacks semantically meaningful business roles which could have a diverse impact upon access decisions in multi-domain business environments. This paper describes our proposed novel access control framework that uses semantic business roles and intelligent agents through implementation of our Intelligent RBAC (I-RBAC) model. It encompasses occupational entitlements as roles for multiple domains. We use the dataset of original occupational roles provided by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), USA. The novelty of the paper lies in developing a core I-RBAC ontology using real-world semantic business roles and intelligent agent technologies together for achieving required level of access control in highly dynamic multi-domain environment. The intelligent agents use WordNet and bidirectional LSTM deep neural network for automated population of organizational ontology from unstructured text policies. This dynamically learned organizational ontology is further matched with our core I-RBAC ontology in order to extract unified semantic business roles. The proposed I-RBAC model is mathematically described and the overall I-RBAC framework and its implementation architecture is explained. At the end, the I-RBAC model is validated through the implementation results that show a linear runtime trend of the model in presence of a large number of permission assignments and multiple queries.

Community detection in network is of vital importance to find cohesive subgroups. Node attributes can improve the accuracy of community detection when combined with link information in a graph. Community detection using node attributes has not been investigated in detail. To explore the aforementioned idea, we have adopted an approach by modifying the Louvain algorithm. We have proposed Louvain-AND-Attribute (LAA) and Louvain-OR-Attribute (LOA) methods to analyze the effect of using node attributes with modularity. We compared this approach with existing community detection approaches using different datasets. We found the performance of both algorithms better than Newman’s Eigenvector method in achieving modularity and relatively good results of gain in modularity in LAA than LOA. We used density, internal and external edge density for the evaluation of quality of detected communities. LOA provided highly dense partitions in the network as compared to Louvain and Eigenvector algorithms and close values to Clauset. Moreover, LOA achieved few numbers of edges between communities.

Significance and popularity of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is inevitable; however, its application is highly challenging in multi-domain collaborative smart city environments. The reason is its limitations in adapting the dynamically changing information of users, tasks, access policies and resources in such applications. It also does not incorporate semantically meaningful business roles, which could have a diverse impact upon access decisions in such multi-domain collaborative business environments. We propose an Intelligent Role-based Access Control (I-RBAC) model that uses intelligent software agents for achieving intelligent access control in such highly dynamic multi-domain environments. The novelty of this model lies in using a core I-RBAC ontology that is developed using real-world semantic business roles as occupational roles provided by Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), USA. It contains around 1400 business roles, from nearly all domains, along with their detailed task descriptions as well as hierarchical relationships among them. The semantic role mining process is performed through intelligent agents that use word embedding and a bidirectional LSTM deep neural network for automated population of organizational ontology from its unstructured text policy and, subsequently, matching this ontology with core I-RBAC ontology to extract unified business roles. The experimentation was performed on a large number of collaboration case scenarios of five multi-domain organizations and promising results were obtained regarding the accuracy of automatically derived RDF triples (Subject, Predicate, Object) from organizational text policies as well as the accuracy of extracted semantically meaningful roles.

Employing cognitive robots, capable of throwing and catching, is a strategy aimed at expediting the logistics process within Industry 4.0’s smart manufacturing plants, specifically for the transportation of small-sized manufacturing parts. Since the flight of mechanically thrown objects is inherently unpredictable, it is crucial for the catching robot to observe the initial trajectory with utmost precision and intelligently forecast the final catching position to ensure accurate real-time grasping. This study utilizes multi-camera tracking to monitor mechanically thrown objects. It involves the creation of a 3D simulation that facilitates controlled mechanical throwing of objects within the internal logistics environment of Industry 4.0. The developed simulation empowers users to define the attributes of the thrown object and capture its trajectory using a simulated pinhole camera, which can be positioned at any desired location and orientation within the in-plant logistics environment of flexible manufacturing systems. The simulation facilitated ample experimentation to be conducted for determining the optimal camera positions for accurately observing the 3D interception positions of a flying object based on its apparent size on the camera’s sensor plane. Subsequently, a variety of calibrated multi-camera setups were experimented while placing cameras at identified optimal positions. Based on the obtained results, the most effective multi-camera configuration setup is derived. Finally, a training dataset is prepared for 3000 simulated throwing experiments where the initial part of the trajectory consists of observed interception positions, through derived best multi-camera setup, and the final part consists of actual positions. The encoder–decoder Bi-LSTM deep neural network is proposed and trained on this dataset. The trained model outperformed the current state-of-the-art by accurately predicting the final 3D catching point, achieving a mean average error of 5 mm and a root-mean-square error of 7 mm in 200 real-world test experiments.

The information sharing tends to be dynamic in multi-domains because different teams are sharing information in a Collaborative Working Environment (CWE). The secure information sharing is a challenge in such environments. The Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is an efficient model for rights management in large systems, but it does not handle dynamisms of collaboration in multi-domain environments to access resources at a fine-grained level. The research aimed to address this issue of secure information and data sharing across multiple domains. The proposed model extends the RBAC model using intelligent agents, ontologies and design patterns. It introduces multi-agent monitors for role and permission assignments, session tracking, constraint handling and maintaining role hierarchy semantically. These agents use deductive learning to adapt changes and help in decision making for role and permission assignment. The model's working is discussed using a case scenario to ensure secure collaboration in a multi-domain environment.