This work addresses the problem of BPM-SOA integration using the services discovery activity as the main driver for that. The developed model is able to select the most adequate (web) services for... Show More

This work addresses the problem of BPM-SOA integration using the services discovery activity as the main driver for that. The developed model is able to select the most adequate (web) services for given business transactions that are modeled at BPM level, regarding their business' contexts and QoS restrictions. It considers an inter-organization scenario, where services are published and made available by disparate providers over largely distributed and heterogeneous repositories, which can also be accessed under the SaaS model. Key elements of the model include a business processes catalog and an ontology based on the UBL open standard, and a QoS ontology. The implemented framework strongly relies on open ICT standards at all tackled levels, facilitating interoperability and the integration of services discovery environment in wider enterprise architecture projects. A software prototype has been implemented and results are described at the end. In spite of a set of assumptions, it was realized that a focus on the dynamic services discovery activity can be a feasible approach for better levering BPM-SOA integration, providing a more flexible basis for enterprises when executing their daily business transactions.

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), alongside Radiological Information Systems (RIS) are nowadays widely disseminated, proven useful, hospital information systems components. The... Show More

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), alongside Radiological Information Systems (RIS) are nowadays widely disseminated, proven useful, hospital information systems components. The “Région Sans Film” (“Filmless Region”) program was launched in 2009 by the French ministry of health in order to help the generalization to all healthcare structures such as hospitals or general physician practices, of PACS, RIS, and archiving of medical images. It is done by means of a mutualized service platform whom building and running has been entrusted to an industrial consortium. This platform implements the latest technologies of medical image processing and of cloud computing. It is built in order to support service-oriented enterprise architecture composed of one main layer of software services. This natively scalable platform is innovative because it is the first one which contains all the materials for the implementation of all services in the cloud. The corresponding SLA are defined in order to be adaptable to the needs of further health structures which could later join the platform by participating in its mutualized purchasing. The goal is not only to share the costs but also to deliver new images sharing services. New business processes/services around sharing of images such as teleradiology or access to the images produced in hospitals to the general practitioners are defined towards the exercise of real filmless radiology.

Service Networks (SNs) are open systems accommodating the co-production of new knowledge and services through organic peer-to-peer interactions. Key to broad success of SNs in practice is their... Show More

Service Networks (SNs) are open systems accommodating the co-production of new knowledge and services through organic peer-to-peer interactions. Key to broad success of SNs in practice is their ability to foster and ensure a high performance. By performance we mean the joint effort of tremendous interdisciplinary collaboration, cooperation and coordination among the network participants. However, due to the heterogeneous background of such participants (i.e., business, technical, etc.), operational gaps are likely to appear in the end-to-end service provisioning process. Especially when there are performance anomalies, the SNs lack of traceability to find out the root cause, due to the confusions in the multi-disciplinary communication of SNs participants. To deal with such a problem, we propose a novel method of diagnosing SNs performance on the basis of a systems thinking mindset. By using our diagnostics, the SNs essence and performance are identified and modeled in both static and dynamic manners. The SNs performance can be tuned and optimized with improved traceability to the involved service operations.

In this paper, we analyze relevant state of the art in the areas of Service Science, Business Modeling and Enterprise Engineering in specifying service systems. The main shortcoming identified... Show More

In this paper, we analyze relevant state of the art in the areas of Service Science, Business Modeling and Enterprise Engineering in specifying service systems. The main shortcoming identified essentially resides in the lack of capability to model the purpose and value of a given service system in a structured way to guide current and future development efforts. In order to address these issues, our research focuses on modeling enterprises as service systems along three perspectives, namely: construction, function and contribution to differentiate and integrate their teleological and ontological models. With the proposed approach, we are able to clearly specify how each component of an enterprise system provides a service – thus value – to other components of the same system or of the environment along different, possibly intertwining and overlapped value chains.