The CINCO group research mission is to develop solutions for service interoperability and management of dynamic business service collaborations. This calls for increased automation of multi-party collaborations and for subjective management of collaborations by each partner.
The solutions are
The group develops facilities for open service ecosystems, i.e., mature environments and methods for inter-enterprise collaboration for networked business, social networks, or public organisations. This involves alignment of infrastructure services for collaboration management, service-oriented software engineering, and governance at enterprise and ecosystem levels.
The open service ecosystems provide individuals or organisations the means of composing inter-enterprise collaborations out of existing software-supported business services, and facilities to dynamically manage that collaboration during its operational time. While virtual organisation breeding environments provide tools for catching new business opportunities and facilities for jointly designing the necessary collaboration contracts, business processes, and monitoring routines, we wish to take a step further. The open service ecosystems add the goal of reacting quickly to routine opportunities by reusing the pre-designed collaboration types and adding eContracting processes with operational time renegotiation opportunities. Furthermore, the aim is to adopt new, previously unknown partners' services for scaling up the size of the ecosystem and its potential for spawning larger amounts of inter-enterprise collaborations. In addition, the open service ecosystems present ecosystem wide governance and trust-decisions subjectively done by each of the independent collaboration partners.
The kind of solutions studied in the CINCO group represent a modern environment in which for example IoT solutions can be hosted, big data collection can be applied for business innovations by private company networks or for decision-making support in eGovernment guidance.
CINCO group work is related to
The design choices made in all CINCO group results reflect the following principles.
A conceptual bridge must be built between business/social processes for collaboration management and the corresponding infrastructure support.The solutions are evaluated against both the improvement in operational time support by the infrastructure and the associated effects in the software and model production methods and tools. The operational and production time environments become merged in a large extent.
The infrastructure services must support change management in enterprises, collaborative system evolution, and change management at the service market level. The kind of collaborations and communities created will always have the need to change and evolve; the facilities provided by computing and communication platforms will always be changing.
We choose to use an open service market model instead of a closed strategic network environment. This is to enable especially small enterprises or individuals to increase their network in a controlled manner.
All solutions reflect aspects of autonomy of participants, contracting, trust formation, and privacy-preservation.
The research issues studied by the CINCO group include
The working methods in the group combine conceptual development with prototype trials on the suggested infrastructure services and tools. In addition, formal methods and verification techniques are applied where suitable. As ways of disseminating results, case studies with enterprises are sought for.
As the impacts of the CINCO group work -- as part of the international research trend on the area -- address a global architecture, it is essential to address activities on education and research forums.
The next steps in building a more mature open ecosystem architecture include
This involves conceptual and technical development of domain specific lanaguages and detailing metamodels of the ecosystem structures.
CINCO group members (and AHJO and ODCE members before that) have been involved with ODP RM (Open distributed processing reference model) standardisation work, and related research driven communities. The developed framework utilises the ODP conceptual basis, applies to it business ecosystem needs, and extends it to technical directions in order to build a consistent, sustainable environment where socio-technical collaborarions can be technically supported with automated activities as far as possible, still under the control of business direction and human decision-making on non-routine situations.