2008 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing
A Model for Digital Business Ecosystem and Topological Analysis Juan Wang
Philippe De Wilde
College of Information Engineering Shenzhen University, China
[email protected]
School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences Heriot-Watt University, UK
[email protected]
describe pieces of software and register them to the system. On the other hand, SMEs interpret their software needs into a software requirement and submit it to the system. According to the software requirement, several software modules will be composed together to meet the needs of the SME. We present a real-world scenario here. For instance, if a SME wants to offer motors for hire, it may need software that enables car rental, motor repairs, petrol services and etc. It can simply generate a description illustrating the requirements and then submit it to the DBE framework. Each of the modules might be produced by an individual SME regarded as a software provider. According to the description of requirements, the system will look for the corresponding modules and find the ’fittest’ combination for the given user requirement. The DBE system acts as a wide smart Internet-enabled bus that enables services to interact, evolve and integrate.
Abstract—This paper presents a novel approach to model a complex evolving system, a Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) that takes the specific needs of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) into account. It aims to provide an open-source distributed environment to support the spontaneous evolution and composition of services for SMEs. A two-tier architecture model as a simplified version of the system is presented, consisting of a business network layer and a P2P communication layer that interact with each other and evolve over time. The benefit of the model-driven approach is to allow us running discrete event simulations on it to study, e.g how the topology of the SME network affects the topology of the P2P communication network. Index Terms—Services, Communication, Business ecosystem
I. I NTRODUCTION Nowadays, enterprises have to form associations and clusters in order to flourish like individuals in an ecosystem. As a consequence, the term ecosystem is widely used to describe the increasingly interrelated nature of enterprises as competing and evolving organisms in a business environment[1][2]. The significance of regarding the business network as an ecosystem is that it highlights the importance of understanding the implication of a company’s decision on its surrounding environment. Therefore, it is very helpful and a promising way to model business networks as ecosystems for further study. Our main concern here is the specific need of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). Compared with large size enterprises, it is difficult for most SMEs to choose the right software for their business processes and they are not good in using Internet as a business tool. Thus, it is useful to provide a new technology framework that software will adapt to SMEs’ needs not the other way round. In this work, we propose an idea of a Digital Business Ecosystem that is aiming to develop examples and technologies to allow business working together in a nature-inspired, organic way. It may help SMEs to adopt new technologies more efficiently and successfully [3]. In the ecosystem, we focus on the ’digital’ aspect of business cooperations, meaning that software components, services and applications are regarded as ’digital species’ that can interact with each other, reproduce and evolve according to laws of market selection.
III. A TWO - TIER ARCHITECTURE MODEL FOR BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM
For building distributed system that deliver services to enduser application or other services, service oriented architecture (SOA) has been shown as a good approach [4]. Here, we propose a simplified model of an open-source distributed system for SMEs, including the elementary elements of a SOA into two corresponding layers. An important part of this work is to present a simplified model for the open-source distributed system, the DBE, so that it is possible to investigate the performance of the system on various aspects when taking the evolutions of the two networks and interactions between them into account. Thus, our model is close to the real-world scenario as much as possible and still making studies and simulations on it possible. We regard the two layers of our model as graphs of nodes and connections, where nodes represent individual SMEs and lookup servers in the communication infrastructure, and links represent business connections between SMEs and virtual connections between lookup servers respectively. Figure 1 shows our model of the overall architecture of the DBE. It is a two-tier structure that consists of a business network layer where SMEs can interact with each other to exchange or migrate services, and a P2P network layer that supports the communication between SMEs.
II. A DBE SCENARIO DBE uses the ’Business Modelling Language’ (BML) for the interpretation of services. SME service providers will
978-0-7695-3283-7/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SCC.2008.63
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In our DBE model, the evolution of populations of services in the SME network results in changes of registrations of services proxies in the P2P network. Through simulations, we found that the topology of the SME business network does affect the topology of the P2P FADA network, as shown in Fig. 2.
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SMEs are virtually grouped in the business network of the model, which is also where the SME ecosystem exists. In this ecosystem, SMEs manage and communicate with other SMEs to produce service chains. Inspired by evolutions of species in natural ecosystems, where fit species reproduce and weak species die out, populations of different services in SMEs can also evolve according to the fitness values of different services in this way.
Fig. 2. The average number of links of FADA nodes in the P2P network as time evolves coupled with the SME network of different connectivity probabilities pSM E
V. C ONCLUSION In this paper, a two-tier model is proposed as a simplified version of the DBE that is aiming to provide an open-source distributed environment that can support the spontaneous evolution and composition of services for SMEs. The model very close to the real-world scenario, and a comprehensive set of simulation can be run on it, such as the topology analysis presented. Based on the model, we are keen to further study some other important aspects in the future, for example, how to design an efficient and robust topology of the P2P network for the SME network. This approach can be extended to many other real-world applications, such as planning of communication network and power network in a city.
B. P2P communication network layer The P2P communication network layer is to support the communications between SMEs in the upper layer, and the main role of it is to store and distribute service proxies. One successful instance of providing services is the FETISH network [5] by applying Sun Microsystem’s Jini technology together with Java technology, where all service interactions are through a Java interface. Services providers can register services in Jini lookup server nodes and service consumers can look for services in the nodes. In this work, the P2P communication network is modelled based on the idea of the SUN Microsystems’ FADA (Federated Advanced Directory Architecture), the advanced version of Jini network. The network can be regarded as a virtual lookup server consisting of different FADA nodes that work together to find services throughout the network [6]. It is a peer-to-peer dynamic, truly distributed system, which holds proxies for services. It maintains services information linking with service registration processes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was partly supported by the EU FP6 funded Project Digital Business Ecosystem, contract number IST2002-507953 and by the Natural Science Foundation of China under the project number 60773203 and 60602066. R EFERENCES [1] J. F. Moore, “Predators and prey: a new ecology of competition,” Harvard business review, vol. 71, no. 3, pp. 75–86, May-June 1993. [2] M. Iansiti and R. Levien, “Strategy as ecology,” Havard Business Review, pp. 68–78, March 2004. [3] “Sixth framework program: Digital business ecosystem, description of work,” Tech. Rep., 2003. [4] J.-K.Lee, S.H.Kuk, H.S.Kim, and S.-W.Park, “Service-oriented architecture based e-engineering framework to support collaborative design,” in IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, 2007, pp. 340– 348. [5] J. Waldo, “The jini architecture for network-centric computing,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 42, no. 7, pp. 76–82, July 1999. [6] “Fetish fueled: European union small travel and tourism companies unite with sun’s Jini technology to compete globally,” Sun Microsystems, http://developers.sun.com/foryourbusiness/featurearchive/fueled.html, Tech. Rep.
IV. S IMULATION In the two-tier network model, SMEs in the business network layer use the P2P communication network to register, publish services, and also find and obtain services needed. Based on the model, we can run a comprehensive set of discrete event simulations to investigate the performance of the system on various aspects. In this way, it is possible to derive some useful ’laws’ for the system, such as the topology of the system and etc.
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