Iain Duncan Stalker

Interoperability Contributions of CrossWork

Effective cross-organisational collaboration enables a company to focus on its core business within a dynamic network of partners providing complementary expertise. This allows companies of all sizes to pursue immediate opportunities in the marketplace through participation in virtual organizations and dynamic supply chains. Such collaboration-based business models, however, place substantial demands on software infrastructures to ensure robust intersystem communication, meaningful information exchange and successful coordination of processes and activities. Interoperability at all levels is paramount and significant advances in enabling software technologies are needed to support this. Interoperability issues are addressed by several EC-funded projects under the 6 Framework Programme. The focus here is on the specific contributions of one of them, CrossWork*, which pursues the automated creation of cross-organisational workflows to support opportunistic collaborations among members of Networks of Automotive Excellence. These collaborations, also known as task groups or virtual enterprises, are formed to pool together resources in the pursuit of business opportunities, for example responding to a call for tender, and are characterised by their decentralised decision-making and transient nature. Effective collaboration among task group members is a key success factor. This includes coordination of activities distributed amongst members, supported by crossorganisational workflows. Such workflows have to be formed in concert with the formation of the task group in a dynamic and opportunistic fashion. Achieving such level of process interoperability relies on frictionless information exchange between the information processing infrastructures of the group members, or interoperability at the systems level, within the context of compatible legal and organisational structures predicating interoperability at the business level. Any successful collaboration is informed and underpinned by a shared understanding and this reveals a fundamental need for semantic interoperability at the information level and beyond. Within this context, CrossWork focuses on the issues at process interoperability and semantic interoperability levels. We see interoperability as a systemic property of the set of collaborating entities, which arises in the context of their collaboration, rather than as an individual property of system components. We are therefore focused

Engineering Business Ecosystems Using Environment-Mediated Interactions

The increasingly complex and dynamic nature of contemporary markets demands that a business engages in an ongoing dialogue with all aspects of its environment, including other cooperative and competitive businesses. Whilst the concept of a business ecosystemcaptures the essence of such a domain, the lack of a convincing software architecture for its support has resulted in solutions which only partially leverages the potential of the forementioned concept. In this paper, we present an architecture for a business ecosystem supporting application based on Dynamic Agent-based Ecosystem Model (DAEM:) a novel and promising approach to support business ecosystems and their adaptation capabilities where the environment plays an identifiable mediating role.

Flexible Behaviours for Emergent Process Interoperability

The dynamic, volatile nature of many contemporary markets means that business opportunities are frequently fleeting. For many, successful leverage of these increasingly depends upon an ability to draw upon networks of partners having complementary skills and expertise; and thus establish ad hoc virtual organisations (VOs). Traditional VO formation derives from a top-down decomposition of the top-level goal, followed by a recruitment of members to implement individual process steps. This approach equates a company with a set of single fixed processes. We argue that this both limits the possibility of finding innovative solutions by restricting the behaviour of the companies; and makes the consideration of political matters problematic. The approach proposed in this aims to address these challenges through innovative use of agent technology, allowing process interoperability to emerge as a result of shared interests and complementary expertise of individual agents. Allowing a decomposition of the business opportunity into subprocesses to emerge from the interactions of the agents providing such processes means that agents can decide when and if to participate. This also foster more creative solution, for instance, an agent may customise its processes for an especially attractive business opportunity. Finally, the approach allows agents to take direct account of political aspects, such as with whom they can work, before offering to contribute towards a virtual organisation

Emergent Process Interoperability within Virtual Organisations

The current speed of market change means that business opportunities today are increasingly short-lived. To successfully pursue these opportunities, enterprises increasingly establish virtual organisations, drawing upon established networks of partners having complementary skills and expertise. The formation of a virtual organisation traditionally derives from a top-down decomposition of a business goal into a set of activities, followed by a recruitment of members to implement these activities. As this essentially presupposes a closed-world context, it does not foster innovative solutions and will fail if a decomposition cannot be found or the recruited members cannot work with each other. The approach proposed here aims to address these challenges through innovative use of agent technology, allowing process interoperability to emerge as a result of shared interests and complementary expertise of individual agents. Members of the virtual organisation are drawn from a comparatively stable yet open business ecosystem or virtual breeding environment [1] in response to a business opportunity which is “pinned” to a notice board as soon as it appears. We show how this approach can complement top-down decomposition, using a simple case study and a prototype. The prototype is implemented in JADE.

Activity Coordination for Flexible Processes in Instant Virtual Enterprises

This paper presents a novel approach to supporting the design and evolution of supply networks which integrates collaborative planning with last-minute responsiveness and supply network evolution. The underlying theoretical model is based on activity coordination (T.W. Malone and K. Crowston) and meta-management (A. Mowshowitz) to deliver two key contributions. Firstly, innovative and emergent compositions of value-adding activities and services are enabled by separating abstract requirements for activities such as transportation from providers (e.g. logistic suppliers). Secondly, responsiveness to last-minute changes of customer needs or transport disturbances is provided by postponing the allocation of providers to abstract activity requirements till the last possible moment, and continuously monitoring and improving the effectiveness of the supplier allocation.

Designing a modular infrastructure for exploratory integration of interoperability approaches

Collaborative work in a virtual organisation requires combining different interoperability approaches to support different aspects such as team composition, process coordination and semantic agreement. In a research context, different permutations of approaches would be tried out to achieve optimal solution; yet when the research task is distributed amongst a number of partners with different specialisations, we need stable “demarcation” lines between areas of exploration. The challenge is then to ensure these lines are drawn in a way which does not constrain the research effort, whilst providing a stable modular infrastructure to serve as a conceptual integration framework linking different approaches, and also as an architecture underpinning exploratory prototypes. We believe that to ensure stability of such an infrastructure we need to base it on sound design principles inspired by theory. This paper demonstrates how has been acheived in the CrossWork research project aiming to automate the formation of virtual organisations and design their cross-organisational workflow. We show how design principles have been used to create a modular infrastructure to underpin the conceptual integration of approaches and to structure the distributed development of an exploratory prototype tool.

Devolved Ontology for Smart Applications

Many smart applications allow enterprises to communicate effectively with and through interconnected computing resources, however, successful communication presupposes a shared understanding; a so-called semantic alignment.Devolved ontology was developed to promote semantic alignment in agile partnerships. We consider the approach to be promising for anyenvironment where multiple contexts interface and co-locate, including, for example, the Pragmatic Web, virtual organisations and indeed smart applications. We motivate and introduce devolved ontology and show how to use this to foster semantic alignment.

Establishing agile partnerships in open environments: extended abstract

The increasingly complex and volatile nature of many contemporary markets means that demands are often best satisfied through dynamic networks of collaborating enterprises Successful collaboration demands tight, flexible integration of business processes, however, this assumes that an appropriate team has been assembled Traditionally, a toplevel service or goal is decomposed into component services or subgoals each of which is then matched to a provider This is a complex task and while automated tools exist, supported especially by the notions of service discovery and traders, significant guidance is typically sought from the user This imposes a substantial burden of interaction and considerable knowledge is demanded of a user to decompose to a level of detail which allows for matching to known services Problems arise if this is not the case and open environments, such as the internet, present additional difficulties: if a user is not up-to-date potential decompositions may be missed; new entrants into a market may not be recognised; etc Bottom-up approaches circumvent some of these difficulties, but also come at a price For example, where goal decompositions are available, these are typically much more inefficient; if there is only a fixed number of processes available within a system, the case of “no solution” may take considerable time to establish Moreover, since many bottom-up approaches distribute control, the system is vulnerable to malicious behaviour Thus, a certain level of trust is required.

Agents for Decentralised Process Design – Extended Abstract

To improve competitiveness in complex and dynamic markets, many businesses seek agile partnerships. As a result, the paradigm of the Virtual Enterprise (VE) – a temporary network of cooperating enterprises in which there is a distribution of control, or decentralisation – has attracted much attention in recent years [1]. Successful collaboration demands a tight, but flexible integration of individual business processes across the VE, and a key element to achieving this is the use of workflow management systems to control these processes. Traditionally, workflow systems are based on two alternative approaches: model-driven workflow (e.g. [2]); and situated dynamic planning and negotiation between intelligent software agents (e.g. [3]). Each has strengths and drawbacks and some researchers, e.g. [4], have tried to get the “best of both worlds” by combining the two paradigms. However, these efforts largely take ad hoc decisions regarding the places and roles of agents in workflow management and construction. The approach reported here differs from these in the use of a formal model of the cognitive aspects of our domain constructed a priori. This allows us to determine the place of agents in a systematic fashion.

Engineering Business Ecosystems Using Environment-Mediated Interactions.

The increasingly complex and dynamic nature of contemporary markets demands that a business engages in an ongoing dialogue with all aspects of its environment, including other cooperative and competitive businesses. Whilst the concept of a business ecosystemcaptures the essence of such a domain, the lack of a convincing software architecture for its support has resulted in solutions which only partially leverages the potential of the forementioned concept. In this paper, we present an architecture for a business ecosystem supporting application based on Dynamic Agent-based Ecosystem Model (DAEM:) a novel and promising approach to support business ecosystems and their adaptation capabilities where the environment plays an identifiable mediating role.