Enterprise collaboration has generated in the past years a consistent background of scientific and industrial knowledge, providing strong support for managers on organisation interoperability and collaboration. Networks fostering enterprise collaboration, often referred to as ‘collaborative networks’ or ‘enterprise networks’, now have solid foundations, with sound references in both academia and industry. Among various propositions for the implementation of enterprise networks, the notion of ‘service orientation’ has emerged in the recent years as a key enabler, especially well suited for collaborative networks.
The goal of this special issue is to establish an international state of the art of the convergence between ‘collaborative networks’ and ‘service orientation’. In the context of enterprise collaboration, service orientation can be studied at both the business and the information system levels. The alignment between these two levels is a key factor for the success in enterprise network’s competitiveness. Therefore, service-driven architecture (SDA) – at the business level of information systems – and service-oriented architectures (SOA) – at the technical level – have to be jointly considered, to enable a good alignment between business services defined at the upper level and IT or Web services defined at the lower level, improving the potential adaptation capabilities of enterprise networks.
The special issue has been supported by the IFIP Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (PROVE, http://www.pro-ve.org/), the Society of Collaborative Network (SoColNet, an international technical and scientific association on collaborative networks, http://www.socolnet.org/), and the Research Network GDR-MACS (Working Group EasyDIM on Enterprise Modelling and Engineering)
Seven papers have been selected to cover this specific topic situated at the crossroads of ‘collaborative networks’ and ‘service orientation’. The selected papers have been organised in three main sections of the special issue:
In the first section, made of the first two first papers, two general approaches dealing with service-oriented concepts and methodologies to support process integration and collaboration at a business level are presented;
In the second section, comprising the next three papers, the specification, implementation and quality assessment of service-based information systems, aligned on business requirements, are addressed in details;
Finally, specific application domains are developed in the third section (last two papers).
The first paper, by Qing Li et al. (CN), focuses on the problem of both business process and data fragmentation, when reactive enterprise networks collaboration is required. An approach based on collaboration modelling and collaboration agents is proposed to solve the problems associated with collaborative management for service convergence, in the context of process and data fragmentation. A model-driven methodology is developed to design and deploy the proposed integrating framework.
The second paper, by Kim Jansson et al. (FI), also proposes a general approach to support the high-level interoperability among business processes. The proposed solution uses services orientation to support the alignment among distributed engineering processes, typical in Marine industry networks. The research results, developed within the EU FP7 COIN project, contribute to a methodology for Collaborative Project Management. In this methodology, building solution on the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm is the technical basis for project alignment, allowing collaborative alignment of engineering networks.
The third paper, by Hamideh Afsarmanesh et al. (NL), starts the second section of the special issue focusing on methodologies for the development of service-oriented information systems. It specifies a model and implementation architecture for the discovery and composition of shared services, supporting the semi-automated development of integrated value-added services in virtual organisations. In the area of service discovery, a main contribution of this work is the formal representation of services’ behaviour and a method for service automated matchmaking based on the service behaviour specified by the users. Automated selection methods have also been developed, to identify the most suitable service(s) according to several service quality aspects, so as to support service integration.
The fourth paper, by Frederick Benaben et al. (FR), goes one step beyond information system deployment. In this paper, focussing as well on SDA and SOA, a methodology and a technical framework for Mediation Information System Engineering supporting collaborative networks have been developed. They provide support for the management of agility for the enterprise network. Agility management allows semi-automatic identification of internal transformations of the collaborative network to generate consistent changes required by the information system itself.
The fifth paper, by Georgiana Stegaru et al. (RO), addresses the important question of quality. While much focus has been given recently in the scientific literature on frameworks for e-service specification, implementation and composition, little research has been done in the area of validation and verification of e-service composition. Nevertheless, quality assurance becomes a key factor to provide the desired end-to-end quality of distributed e-services in a collaborative environment requiring not just an agreement on quality attributes, but also monitoring and control during runtime. This paper proposes a Quality of e-service Composition framework for quality assessment of e-service composition for collaborative networks. This framework comprises a quality model for e-service evaluation and guidelines for quality of e-service composition process. A prototype implementation is presented in the area of telemedicine.
The sixth paper, by Luis Camarinha-Matos et al. (PT), starts the last section on specific application areas for service-based collaborative networks. The paper deals with the health care domain and concentrates on care services ecosystem for ambient assisted living. Effective provision of care and assistance services in ambient assisted living requires collaboration of multiple stakeholders. To support such a collaboration, the paper proposes a conceptual architecture to help designing and operating such care ecosystem. The aim is not simply to support the development of complex technological artefacts, but rather to design systems supporting the formation and operation of sustainable ambient assisted living ecosystems. A three-layered model is adopted to ease the understanding and modelling of interrelated concepts: (1) infrastructure layer, (2) care and assistance services layer and then (3) ambient assisted living ecosystem layer.
The last paper, by Maiara Heil Cancian et al. (BR), focuses on the area of software industry. Most software companies are small, sharing an underdeveloped culture of collaboration with other companies, mostly sporadically collaborating with the same partners. The main goal of this article is to present a framework of the processes at play when companies are collaborating to jointly supply services-based software solutions. More than being a comprehensive list of collaborative business processes, the proposed framework has the potential to serve as a reference guide for service providers’ managers implementing and managing the collaboration with other organisations, since processes are categorised, prioritised, inter-related and detailed in terms of operational base practices and indicators.
Xavier Boucher
FAYOL Institute, École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de St Etienne, 158 Cours Fauriel, 42023 ST-ETIENNE Cedex, France
Willy Picard
Department of Information Technology, Poznań University of Economics, Niepodległości 10, 61-875 Poznań, Poland