Maintaining Trustworthiness of Socio-Technical Systems at Run-Time

Trustworthiness of dynamical and distributed socio-technical systems is a key factor for the success and wide adoption of these systems in digital businesses. Different trustworthiness attributes should be identified and accounted for when such systems are built, and in order to maintain their overall trustworthiness they should be monitored during run-time. Trustworthiness monitoring is a critical task which enables providers to significantly improve the systems’ overall acceptance. However, trustworthiness characteristics are poorly monitored, diagnosed and assessed by existing methods and technologies. In this paper, we address this problem and provide support for semi-automatic trustworthiness maintenance. We propose a trustworthiness maintenance framework for monitoring and managing the system’s trustworthiness properties in order to preserve the overall established trust during run-time. The framework provides an ontology for run-time trustworthiness maintenance, and respective business processes for identifying threats and enacting control decisions to mitigate these threats. We also present use cases and an architecture for developing trustworthiness maintenance systems that support system providers.