Managing Conflicts of Interest in Virtual Organisations

In this paper, we present a formal model of virtual organisations that incorporates the concept of conflicts of interest. The model, which follows an incremental development approach using Event-B, focuses on goals and organisations at the abstract level and introduces resources at the concrete level. The model is motivated by the type of virtual organisations used in the domain of scientific experiments. Individual organisations, at the abstract level, are allowed to pursue conflicting goals within a virtual organisation. However, at the concrete level, these conflicts are isolated by applying a separation of resources mechanism. This ensures that no resource is allocated to any two conflicting goals.