In Service-Oriented Virtual Organization Breeding Environments (SOVOBEs), services performed by people, organizations and information systems are composed in potentially complex business processes performed by a set of partners. In a SOVOBE, the success of a virtual organization depends largely on the partner and service selection process, which determines the composition of services performed by the VO partners. In this paper requirements for a partner and service selection method for SOVOBEs are defined and a novel Multi-Aspect Partner and Service Selection method, MAPSS, is presented. The MAPSS method allows a VO planner to select appropriate services and partners based on their competences and their relations with other services/partners. The MAPSS method relies on a genetic algorithm to select the most appropriate set of partners and services. Full article: http://www.kti.ue.poznan.pl/en/node/2607

1. 12th October 2010, Saint-Etienne, France
MAPSS, a Multi-Aspect
Partner and Service Selection Method
Zbigniew Paszkiewicz Willy Picard
zpasz@kti.ue.poznan.pl picard@kti.ue.poznan.pl
Poznań University of Economics

2. Agenda
• Method assumptions
• Social protocols
• Information model
• Selection method
• Technical implementation
• Limitations
• Conclusions
• Future works
© UEP 2

3. Method assumptions

4. Current approaches
• Missing an approach integrating
– Competence-based approach
– Performance evaluation
– Social aspects
• Separation of service search from the selection of
partners
• Not mature concepts of modeling social
requirements
© UEP 4

5. MAPSS method assumptions
• Partner and service selection method supporting
• Social aspects
• Competence-based selection
• Partner and network performance characteristic
• Human control over the process
The novelty of the proposed method lays in the
• Multi-variant analysis of the concepts
combination
• Requirement-based approach
© UEP 5

6. Social protocols

7. Social protocol
• Process model encompassing
Referring to VO elements, e.g.
• Process structure - localization
• Requirements - required set of competences
» Roles - level of available resources
A set of constraints on the
- response time of a service
» Social requirements relations among interacting
- cost of the service
actors (organizations and
services), e.g.
- past cooperation
- recognition
- use of service
- recommendation
© UEP 7

8. Abstract protocol
Service customer
Service provider
Service Process activity
(organization)
(organization)
Partners and services are
referred together as
VO elements
Mapping function
Social network schema
© UEP 8

9. Mapping Mapping
social network entities social network entities
to to
service description elements Social network schema
entities
9

10. Multi-aspect partner and service
selection (MAPSS)

11. Method information model

12. Competence description module
Service description module
• Structured description of organization’s competences
and services
• Basis for definition of roles
• Organization/service search based on submitted criteria
• Evaluation of the conformance of an organization to a set
of requirements
In the current implementation
a modified 4-C model (Ermilova, Afsarmanesh) is used
© UEP 12

13. Social network module
• Contents
– Virtual organizations
– Virtual organization partners
– VOBE members
– Individuals
– Virtual Organization variants
– Services
• Basis for definition of social requirements
© UEP 13

14. Indicator module
Monitoring module
Not only performance indicators
• Definition of complex requirements involving various
aspects in a single indicator, e.g.
– competences and social relations
• Monitoring of requirement values and notification of
changes
© UEP 14

15. Selection method

16. Method outline
1. Definition of VO specification
2. Selection of partners and services for roles
3. VO variant generation
4. Performance evaluation
5. VO inception
In every phase, human action may lead to requirements
redefinition, preference modification, repetition of a steps, and
reconfiguration of used supporting tools
© UEP 16

17. 1 Definition of VO specification
• Set of requirements
• VO planner’s preferences
• VO planner’s fitness functions and acceptable
requirement conformance levels
© UEP 17

18. 1 Definition of VO specification
• Requirement types
– Roles Defined in
abstract social
– Social requirements
protocol
– Indicators i.e. performance requirements
• Aspects
– VO elements
User defined
– Process
– Subsets of partners
– Subsets of services
© UEP 18

19. Selection of partners and
2
services for role
• Set of services or organizations
for each role
• Sorting and filtering out
elements
• Requirements used
– Roles
– Indicators defined for roles
© UEP 19

20. 3 Generation of VO variants
• Genetic algorithm -
VO Variant -
determination of the best fitted
possible
VO variants
composition of
• Fitness function - estimation of
partners and
the level of satisfaction of social
requirements
services
• Threshold value - used to filter
out the VO variants
• Requirements used
– Social requirements
© UEP 20

21. 4 Performance evaluation
• Fitness performance function -
taking into an account various
performance aspects, including
– Operational performance
– Effectiveness
– Responsiveness
– Cost
• Requirements used
– Performance requirements
© UEP 21

22. 5 VO inception
• Choosing the “winning” VO
variant
• Registration as a VO in
– competence description
– social network
© UEP 22

23. VO specification structure
Aspects Roles Social req. Performance req.
Partner Phase 2 - -
Service Phase 2 - -
Subset of partners - Phase 3 -
Subset of services - Phase 3 Phase 4
Process - - Phase 4
Phase 2. Selection of partners and services for roles
Phase 3. VO variant generation
Phase 4. Performance evaluation
© UEP 23

24. Technical implementation

25. System implementation
• ErGo system
• To be used in constructing
sector
© UEP 25

26. Implementation environment
• Programming platform
– Java
• Web application
– Google web Toolkit
• System modularity
– OSGi
• Genetic algorithm
– Java Genetic Algorithm Package
• Social network
– Java Universal Network Graph Framework
© UEP 26

27. 27

28. Limitations

29. Limitations
• Instantiation of the whole social protocol
before process launching
• Single user approach
• Privacy related issues are not addressed
• Static method
© UEP 29

30. Conclusions

31. Conclusions
• Combination of social aspects, competence-
based selection and performance
characteristic
• Already implemented
• Ongoing validation in constructing sector
• Source of social data
© UEP 31

32. Future works

33. Future works
• Continuous selection
• Collaborative method
• Dynamic selection method
Method configurability
+
method instance logging
=
recommendation method based on
process mining techniques
© UEP 33

34. MAPSS, a Multi-Aspect
Partner and Service Selection Method
Thank you
Zbigniew Paszkiewicz Willy Picard
zpasz@kti.ue.poznan.pl picard@kti.ue.poznan.pl
Poznań University of Economics