Dissertation presented to obtain the degree of
Doctor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, specialization on Collaborative Enterprise NetworksCollaborative-Networks (CN) have experienced a fast evolution in the last two decades. The
collaboration among independent entities or professionals supported by Information and
Communication Technology (ICT) has attracted the research community to establish the
conceptual basis for this scientific discipline. Service Orientation has been one of the key selected paradigms for that conceptual basis. Nevertheless, the service concept itself does not have a common understanding in the Business and ICT worlds. In the former, client satisfaction,
resources management and business process models are some example concerns, whilst the later deals with interoperability, remote function calling or communication protocols.
If for example an enterprise provides some service, it may hire specialists to wrap such
service into web-services, expecting to reach worldwide potential new clients. In fact, nowadays Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are the technological elements most commonly used. However, these are passive elements in the sense they do not perform any action
towards pursuing business interests, which constitute a limiting factor from a business
perspective. Another approach for the above mentioned enterprise is to follow the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) approach, as the pro-activity is a keyword in such contexts. Nevertheless, as MAS approaches are not so commonly used and not so robust yet, the worldwide potential set of new clients is reduced; which also constitutes an inhibitor factor from the business perspective.
This dissertation proposes a Pro-Active Services Ecosystem Framework, gathering
inspiration from both the SOA and MAS research areas, trying to bridge the business and ICT worlds through the base concepts for the creation of a Services’ Ecosystem where business services are represented in a pro-active manner towards pursuing business interests, like finding
collaboration opportunities or improving the chances each CN member has to see its services selected among competitors, for example. This work also includes a prototype system applied / validated in the area of a Professional Virtual Community of Senior Professionals
