Sharing policies for multi-partner asset management in smart environments

Smart environments are ecosystems, which seamlessly embed IT assets into physical world´s objects and hold promise for improving the services we receive from our social and economic ecosystems. The management of smart environment assets in multi-partner, dynamic collaboration scenarios where different sets of assets are owned and operated by different partners is a non-trivial problem, due to restrictive asset sharing policies applied by collaborating partners. In this work we formalize, evaluate and compare two asset sharing policies, investigating their impact on MSTA-P, a policy-regulated version of an existing asset-task assignment protocol. The first sharing policy is based on a traditional asset ownership model while the second is based on an edge model allowing asset sharing among collaborating partnes through cross-partner team formations. We find that while the traditional ownership model allows slightly better performance, the difference is only marginal, so a team-sharing model offers a viable alternative sharing approach.