Service Federation in Virtual Organizations

Abstract

The practical implantation of the concept of dynamic virtual enterprise is still far from expectations due to a number of factors such as the lack of appropriate interoperable infrastructures and tools, lack of common ontology, and the socio-organizational difficulties. However, the creation of industry clusters supported by advanced information and communication tools can meanwhile provide a basis for the rapid creation of dynamic virtual enterprises in response to the market opportunities. A federated service management approach is introduced in this context and its application to the tourism industry is discussed. Finally, the support for the aggregation of simpler services into value-added services, implemented by distributed business processes within different organizations, is presented.

Supporting Business Processes for Collaborative Alliances of Software Service Providers

“…Romero et al [11] identified a list of processes along the collaboration life cycle, but at a too generic level. Rabelo et al [12], Krogstie [13], Franco et al [14] and Camarinha-Matos et al [15,16] adopted the VBE concept as a wider and logical federation of providers to cope with that wider services-based digital business ecosystems, but also without identifying the required business processes. Cancian et al [17] have elicited the processes and practices for SSPs that want to develop a joint SOA solution, but just assuming that companies would come from a federation.…”

Pattern-based e-service modelling for virtual service enterprises

“…The goal is not to cluster capabilities but assign them to as many different organisations as possible-in particular those capabilities that implement vital parts of control functionality (e.g. ccr 3,7,9 ). This prevents single organisations to gain too much influence on control functions and opens insight into state and data of the service process to a wider set of organisations.…”

“…Naturally, these approaches do not consider the specific requirements of virtualising SVN coordination. Some approaches have also addressed virtual organisation in specific areas of the service sector like tourism [3] on the basis of software service federation and composition. Such projects have underpinned the effectiveness of software service technologies-as promoted by the paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) [4]-and especially Web Service technologies [5] for specific SVN use cases.…”

Dynamic Virtual Organizations, or Not so Dynamic?

“…• Service-federation I service-market frameworks -According to this model, enterprises should be able to plug/unplug their services tolfrom service directories [4]. By means of proper "standard" service interface, the interoperability with other (requesting) enterprises, regardless of the heterogeneity associated with the actual implementation of the services themselves, is supported.…”