Project A1a: On designing and implementing benefit-sharing mechanisms :

This is about identifying which benefit-sharing and coordination mechanisms work best under which circumstances for basins anywhere in the Andes and the reasons underpinning failure or success in specific basin instances. It is about providing a common platform - a negotiation support system - as a means of informing the BSM negotiation process with the best available knowledge. The project will seek to identify the variables that need to be taken into account when BSM are designed and proposed as ways to curb rural poverty and environmental degradation. The possible effects of global change on these variables will be analyzed, along with the likelihood that changes in these variables will impact the viability of BSM. Adaptations to BSM that may help them accommodate global change will be explored

Quarterly Report (QR4)

In the fourth quarter, two beta releases of the StratusLab cloud distribution were made and deployed on the project's reference cloud infrastructure. The v1.0 production release is expected just after the close of Q4 due to the scheduling of the project's development sprints. The project continues to operate a production grid service over the StratusLab cloud distribution, demonstrating its functionality and stability. The project has also demonstrated the deployment of a grid site with the Claudia service manager with some autoscaling features

Dealing with change in process choreographies: Design and implementation of propagation algorithms

Enabling process changes constitutes a major challenge for any process-aware information system. This not only holds for processes running within a single enterprise, but also for collaborative scenarios involving distributed and autonomous partners. In particular, if one partner adapts its private process, the change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Accordingly, it might have to be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge in this context is to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches are limited with respect to the change operations considered as well as their dependency on a particular process specification language. This paper presents a generic change propagation approach that is based on the Refined Process Structure Tree, i.e., the approach is independent of a specific process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. For all these change patterns, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve consistency and compatibility of the process choreography. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype of a change propagation framework for process choreographies is presented. Overall, comprehensive change support in process choreographies will foster the implementation and operational support of agile collaborative process scenarios

NEGOSEIO: framework for the sustainability of model-oriented enterprise interoperability

Dissertation to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering(Industrial Information Systems)This dissertation tackles the problematic of Enterprise Interoperability in the current globally connected world. The evolution of the Information and Communication Technologies has endorsed the establishment of fast, secure and robust data exchanges, promoting the development of networked solutions. This allowed the specialisation of enterprises (particularly SMEs) and favoured the development of complex and heterogeneous provider systems. Enterprises are abandoning their self-centrism and working together on the development of more complete solutions. Entire business solutions are built integrating several enterprises (e.g., in supply chains, enterprise nesting) towards a common objective. Additionally, technologies, platforms, trends, standards and regulations keep evolving and demanding enterprises compliance. This evolution needs to be continuous, and is naturally followed by a constant update of each networked enterprise’s interfaces, assets, methods and processes. This unstable environment of perpetual change is causing major concerns in both SMEs and customers as the current interoperability grounds are frail, easily leading to periods of downtime, where business is not possible. The pressure to restore interoperability rapidly often leads to patching and to the adoption of immature solutions, contributing to deteriorate even more the interoperable environment. This dissertation proposes the adoption of NEGOSEIO, a framework that tackles interoperability issues by developing strong model-based knowledge assets and promoting continuous improvement and adaptation for increasing the sustainability of interoperability on enterprise systems. It presents the research motivations and the developed framework’s main blocks, which include model-based knowledge management, collaboration service-oriented architectures implemented over a cloud-based solution, and focusing particularly on its negotiation core mechanism to handle inconsistencies and solutions for the detected interoperability problems. It concludes by validating the research and the proposed framework, presenting its application in a real business case of aerospace mission design on the European Space Agency (ESA).FP7 ENSEMBLE, UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE project

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Challenges and lessons learned from integrated landscape management projects

There are growing concerns about local and regional ecosystems and their vulnerability in relation to human activities. This case study evaluates 10 Integrated Land Management (ILM) projects from Canada, the U.S. and Europe to provide information that will help promote better awareness of potential environmental and cumulative impacts due to development priorities and choices. ILM builds on a spectrum of approaches including integrated resource management, integrated watershed management, comprehensive regional land use planning and ecosystem-based management. The study found that ILM..

Negotiating Innovation

In this paper, it is argued that innovation can be the result of a repetitive, multi-actor negotiation process. We present the case of an environment-related product innovation in a large multinational company which emerged as the outcome of a complex interaction process in which numerous external and internal actors negotiated to safeguard their own interests. This negotiation perspective challenges conventional economic views of innovations, in which new products and processes are regarded as exogenous variables, the outcomes of deliberately planned research, or the combination of technology (pushing) and market (pulling) inducements. Instead, innovation may be a non-linear, unpredictable process which involves multiple actors with divergent interests and which leads to outcomes that are collectively acceptable but not necessarily (sub)optimal