Service-oriented Communities: Models and Concepts towards Fractal Social Organizations

Service-oriented Communities: Models and Concepts towards

Fractal Social Organizations

Vincenzo De Florio, Antonio Coronato,

Mohamed Bakhouya, Giovanna Di Marzo

PATS / University of Antwerp & iMinds

Structure

• Urgent need: Rethinking organizations

• Conjecture: Three key aspects to be

addressed

• A design: Service-oriented communities

• Models

• Conclusions

2 26 November 2012 SITIS 2012

Times, they are a-changin’…

3

Less resources

Higher peaks

of requests

Higher number

of users…

ICT

Energy product-

ion & distribution

Businesses

Transport of

goods & people

Water treatment

& distribution

Healthcare… Understanding & rethinking

our organizations is crucial!

26 November 2012 SITIS 2012

With the meter in the red zone…

• …organizations that appeared to work fine

now reveal limitations

…they use up too many resources

…they do not scale well

…they are intolerable to changes

…they fail to address new aspects

→ Traditional approaches are reaching

structural limits.


An example: healthcare

26 November 2012 5 SITIS 2012

From www.fifthplay.com

• New context reveals the limitations of the

traditional approach

The healthcare crisis

• Unmanageability is approaching

How should we rethink healthcare?

• Starting point: Three observations:

Society at large is not part of the solution

Too many resources are wasted

No complex behaviours are expected from the

vast majority of the components

Organization (mostly hierarchical) is inflexible,

does not scale well, implies huge costs…


Three key aspects: Society, organization, behaviour

• A purely technical solution simply does not

work

See e.g. Hardin’s “Tragedy of Commons”

• Society must be part of the solution

• Society abundant, mobile “resources” able

to exercise complex action

In particular, collaboration.


Three key aspects... 1) SOCIETY

• Organizational / architectural choices define

the features of our systems

Centralized, hierarchical, heterarchical,

distributed…

• Distributed: e.g. holarchies & fractal orgs

Biologically inspired

Members are “simultaneously a part and a whole,

a container and a contained, a controller and a

controlled” [Sou00]

Three key aspects... 2) ORGANIZATION


• I.e., “change w.r.t. surroundings” [RWB43]

• Ability to

introspect,

analyze and locate limiting factors w.r.t.

environmental conditions

learn how to reconfigure and reshape oneself

so as to match a “dynamically varying set of

environmental conditions” [DeB10]:

• Complex, collective, adaptive behaviours.

Three key aspects... 3) BEHAVIOUR


• A social organization built by explicitly

addressing the mentioned aspects

Taps into “social energy”

Makes use of a distributed organization

Supports complex adaptive and autonomic

behaviours.

Service-oriented communities


11

Service provider Service

requester

Service registry

Starting point: classical SOA model

Publish Discover

Bind

Service

description


Reasoning & coordination

12

Member Member

Member w/

service & feature registry

Service

& feature

SoC building block

Publish Publish

Bind

Individual &

social concerns

optimization.

Capabilities

Policies

Availability

Location…

Events

People Devices


SOCIETY

BEHAVIOUR

OR

GA

NIZ

AT

ION

Example:

Mutual Assistance Community

13

ABC Shop

Smartdevices

Informal serviceprovider

Commercial vender

Doctor

Community

Access

A smart house

Coordinationcenter

(professional)

OSGIGateway

Create

OWL-S

OWL-S servicepublication

Service

Request



OWL-SMatcher

OSGI

bundle

OSGI

bundle

OSGI

bundle


More info: [DeB10]

Mutual Assistance Community

• Organization based on a single SoC building block

Aim: optimally employing devices & human beings with diverse capabilities, backgrounds, and information so as to organize intelligent responses to AAL-related problems

Not just safety nets: • Reducing social isolation of elderly people

• Reducing costs – best utilizing the social resources

Self-serve paradigm (mutually satisfying requests).


15

Member Member

Service

description

SoC as a fractal social organization

Publish Publish

Bind

Local

Reasoning & coordination

Individual &

social concerns

optimization

Capabilities

Policies

Availability

Location…

Events

People Devices


Member Member Member Member

Exception Event propagation

Member w/

service & feature registry





Member Member Member

Member

Member Member L0 Member

Member

L1 Member

Member L0 Member

Member Member L0 Member

Member Member

L0 Member

L1 Member

L2 Member

• Members publish events, attributes, policies…

• Events trigger analysis, planning, reaction,

and re-organization

• Exceptions propagate events to a higher level

• Concept applicable to various domains

AAL, crisis management, business organizations,

etc.

Service-oriented Community


• Societies as multisets of roles, e.g.

{GP2, nurse2, patient8}

• Situations induce a partitioning, e.g.

L = {GP, nurse, patient7}

R = {GP, nurse, patient}

Left side is inactive, right side is active (dealing

with situation at hand)

Active part of society = community.

Elements of formal model (1/2)


• Evolution can be modelled as the dynamics of

sets L(t) and R(t):

(L(t),R(t)) t ≥ 0

• A way to represent this dynamics is through

permutations of the society multiset

• This reveals certain properties.

Elements of formal model (2/2)


Self-similarity


• Activity: «situation : action»

• Action: ( role → step )

• E.g. «fallen : (role-δ1 → alarm(fallen))»

• A role-δ1 actor needs to be located

OK: new community

KO: exception

• n actions n communities / exceptions

• More information in the paper.

Elements of operational model


• We introduced the main ideas of SoC, a

fractal social organization based on three key

“principles”:

Society, behaviour, organization

• Much is yet to be done

From principles to simulation & actual design

From design to deployment & testing

Formal models to guarantee resilience...

Etc.

Conclusions


• [RWB43] Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior,

Purpose and Teleology". Philosophy of Science, 10(1943), S. 18–24

• [DeB10] V. De Florio, C. Blondia, "Service-oriented Communities: Visions and

Contributions towards Social Organizations", Proc. of MONET 2010, LNCS Vol.

6428/2010

• [Ha1968] Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons", Science, Vol. 162 (Dec.

1968)

• [Sou00] P. Sousa, N. Silva, T. Heikkila, M. Kallingbaum and P. Valcknears, P.

“Aspects of Co-operation in Distributed Manufacturing Systems”. Studies in

Informatics and Control Journal, 9 (2), 2000

• V. De Florio, "The HeartQuake Dynamic System", Complex Systems, Vol. 9, No.

2, April 1995, pp. 91-114. (Complex Systems Publications, Champaign, IL)

• V. De Florio, "Permutation Numbers", Complex Systems, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2005

(Complex Systems Publications, Champaign, IL).

References


http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1948509.1948583




http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/09-2-1.pdf

http://www.complex-systems.com/pdf/15-2-1.pdf

Technology

Service-oriented Communities: Models and Concepts towards Fractal Social Organizations