abstract: |
Interoperation between electronic services is one of the most challenging and pressing issues in today’s increasingly globalized and de-centralized economy. Our proposal tackles this challenge with a unified research program based on two key notions: “interoperation hubs”, that enable flexible, scalable support for service collaborations in an open network, and “dynamic artifacts”, that provide an approach to modeling and deploying business processes that simplifies the management of “hand-offs” of data and process between different services and organizations. The research has three streams: (a) scientific, to develop the new notion of artifact-centric interoperation hub, and a surrounding framework of service coordination, views, evolution, verification, and process mining based on formal and empirical techniques and tools; (b) technology, to develop a substantial prototype for creating and operating these hubs, that integrates the techniques and tools devised by the scientific research stream; and (c) validation, to demonstrate and test the results of the research. The ACSI research program will simplify the creation and maintenance of service collaboration environments as follows:
1. At least 40% reduction, over conventional techniques, in the design and deployment of environments that support large numbers of service collaborations with similar goals
2. At least 20% reduction, over conventional techniques, in the costs of on-boarding into, and maintaining, service collaborations
3. At least 30% reduction in on-going manual activity needed to support typical service collaborations
4. At least 90% of data transformation in service collaborations will be automated
ACSI's consortium combines world-class researchers in all of the key technical areas needed for this research, including experts on artifact-centric business processes, verification, data integration and ontologies, process mining, services architectures, and business process management. |