The Sapere project (of which I’m a member) is running a workshop at SASO 2012 in Lyons on new ways to design service ecosystems. Emerging distributed computing scenarios (mobile, pervasive, and social) are characterised by intrinsic openness, decentralisation, and dynamics. According, the effective deployment and execution of distributed services and applications calls for open service frameworks promoting situated and self-adaptive behaviours, and supporting diversity in services and long-term evolvability. This suggests adopting nature-inspired and/or socially-inspired approaches, in which services are modelled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. Accordingly, the self-organizing interactions patterns among components and the resulting emerging dynamics of the system, as those of natural systems or of social systems, can inherently exhibit effective properties of self-adaptivity and evolvability. Although many initiatives (like those named upon digital/business service ecosystems) recognise that the complexity of modern service systems is comparable to that of natural ecosystems, the idea that nature – other than a mean to metaphorically characterise their complexity – can become the source of inspiration for their actual modelling and implementation is only starting being metabolised. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners, with the aims of unfolding the many challenges related to the modelling, design and implementation of adaptive service ecosystems in natural and social terms, and identifying promising approaches and solutions. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Software architectures for emergent distributed systems.
- Bio-inspired self-organising patterns design patterns.
- Coordination models and languages.
- Middleware platforms
- Dynamic services composition.
- Adaptive coordination models and patterns
- Self-organisation and coordination
- Coordination in systems of feedback loops
- Middleware for adaptive coordination
- Multiagent systems
- Methodologies for adaptive and self-organising system engineering