The purpose of this project is to develop efficient load-balancing algorithms for future distributed system architectures, motivated by the major applications which they will be supporting. Applications which are specifically targeted include transaction processing, intelligent office systems, and general purpose parallel computing. The system configurations of particular interest to LYDIA include clusters of workstations, distributed memory parallel machines and virtual shared memory parallel machines. An Interface Definition Language (IDL), specific for load balancing will be developed, to facilitate the flow of load balancing information and associated decision making.

The Open Network for Tourism (OnTour) project will develop and validate new ways of workflow in the business between suppliers, vendors and customers in the tourist value chain. Therefore, an open network for electronic commerce in tourist business will be developed offering new access to and distribution of information for the partners of the value chain. The network will integrate and facilitate interoperability of existing technologies – especially the Internet – to give also new impulses for innovating the workflow of other companies and branches of business characterised by supply chain management such as forwarding business, event tourism, mail order houses, etc.

The OnTour network will allow all kinds of companies in tourist business to offer and request services, enabling especially smaller and medium sized organisations to participate in the business as equal partners. Additionally, the traveller will get the opportunity to communicate directly to destination agencies and suppliers, such as car rentals and hotels. Thus, OnTour will offer a completely integrated solution supporting all kinds of communication during the tourist business chain. Entire business processes, e.g. information of the tourist, booking the journey, service at the destination and even all payments will be carried out via the OnTour network.

The objectives of OnTour are to enforce the role of SME as suppliers and transport providers by bundling destination services in the environment of a virtual organisation as well as to enforce the role of consolidators as information brokers for the customer markets. Subsequently, OnTour will be a platform for improving the marketing chances of SME’s in terms of destination agencies or transport providers, enabling virtual sales of tourism products and connecting customer- and supplier-markets by a common platform. The aim of OnTour is not to compete with travel agencies but to support them. Only travel agencies have the knowledge to advise the traveller which offer suits his needs best. OnTour will enable travel agencies to provide even better service than they can offer nowadays. On the other hand, travellers connected to the Internet (currently less than 10% of the European population) can use OnTour to get basic information but also to organise the travel completely on their own.

The functionality provided by the OnTour system cannot be substituted by already existing solutions. They only provide small subsets of the OnTour functionality such as travel offers but do not support booking, services, accounting transactions, electronic cash etc. A lot of these systems are of proprietary character and can only be used between some companies which makes it very difficult for other partners to enter the business. OnTour will evaluate which of these systems may be integrated into the OnTour system to utilise already working services. Within the OnTour project, a pilot installation of the network will be carried out, establishing a network that consists of a consolidator and two destination agencies with their associated suppliers. The network will be used in real business and give experiences that will be important for the final product that will be developed and marketed after the end of the project.

«The text from website : OnTour »

Η βελτίωση της ανταγωνιστικότητας της ελληνικής βιομηχανίας τουρισμού, και ειδικότερα των μικρομεσαίων επιχειρήσεων που συγκαταλλέγονται σε αυτήν, εξαρτάται σε μεγάλο βαθμό από τον εκσυγχρονισμό του πληροφοριακού δικτύου, μέσα στο οποίο διευθετείται η παροχή των τουριστικών υπηρεσιών στο κοινό. Το έργο Ηλεκτρονικό Εμπόριο αποβλέπει στη δημιουργία ενός ολοκληρωμένου περιβάλλοντος ηλεκτρονικού εμπορίου για τις ελληνικές τουριστικές επιχειρήσεις, το οποίο να ανταποκρίνεται στις απαιτήσεις μιας παγκόσμιας αγοράς τουριστικών υπηρεσιών διαμορφούμενης με βάση και τις τεχνολογικές εξελίξεις. Το πλαίσιο συνεργασίας για το σχεδιασμό του ολοκληρωμένου περιβάλλοντος ηλεκτρονικής εμπορείας τουριστικών υπηρεσιών συμπεριλαμβάνει τρεις κύριες δράσεις: την υιοθέτηση σύγχρονων επιχειρηματικών πρακτικών, τη χρησιμοποίηση αξιόπιστης τηλεπικοινωνιακής υποδομής, και τη μεταφορά της απαραίτητης τεχνογνωσίας από τον τομέα της πληροφορικής. Η εφαρμογή των τελικών αποτελεσμάτων αναμένεται να επιδράσει συνολικά στον κύκλο εργασιών της τουριστικής οικονομίας, και να δημιουργήσει υπηρεσίες και προϊόντα προστιθέμενης αξίας προσιτά σε όλους τους φορείς που εμπλέκονται στον κλάδο του τουρισμού (προμηθευτές και πράκτορες τουριστικών υπηρεσιών, χρήστες-καταναλωτές).

iTrust is an Information Society Technologies (IST) Working Group, etseblished in 1st of August, 2002. The Working Group is funded as a Concerted Action / Thematic Network by the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) unit of the IST programme.

Το Δίκτυο Αριστείας Λογισμικού, Υπηρεσιών και Συστημάτων (S-Cube) χρηματοδοτείται από το FP7

Το Δίκτυο Υπηρεσιών Λογισμικού και Συστημάτων (S-Cube) θα ιδρύσει μια ενοποιημένη, διεπιστημονική, ενεργή ερευνητική κοινότητα που θα οδηγήσει την Ευρώπη στην επανάσταση των υπηρεσιών λογισμικού, προωθώντας το σχηματισμό υπηρεσιών λογισμικού στο διαδίκτυο που είναι η βάση της μελλοντικής κοινωνίας.

Perspectives on Services

We are continuing a series of research workshops on SSME (in the style of the Gordon Conferences, see here).

The workshops will be of an international and interdisciplinary character and will help forge a new research and scientific community on Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME).

Typically the workshops will be limited in size (40-50 participants), will focus on a single research topic within SSME. They will foster the free exchange of ideas and help researchers, both from academia and industry, both senior and young researchers and graduate students from around the world, to network and start new cooperative research projects.

They will typically start on a Sunday and finish on a Thursday of the same week. They will also have a strong educational component, addressing both basic and applied research issues. In addition they will strive to promote best practices in SSME.

The first workshop in the series was held in Crete, during the last week of May 2007 (from Wednesday May 30 to Sunday June 3). The topic of this first workshop was: “The Business Process in the Service Science”.

The second workshop will be held in Palermo, Italy from June 2nd to June 6th. This workshop will be by invitation only and will be limited to 40-50 participants.

Funding will initially be provided by S-Cube Network of Excellence, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica and IBM. Additional industrial sponsors are kindly invited to fund these events and will be gratefully acknowledged.

Second SSME workshop : http://www.ssme2008.tsl.gr/

Scloss Dagstuhl, 25.07.10 – 30.07.10, Seminar 10301

Perspectives Workshop: Service Value Networks [more]

Bill Hefley (CMU – Pittsburgh, US), Christos Nikolaou (University of Crete – Heraklion, GR), Stefan Tai (Universität Karlsruhe, DE)

Motivation

Services are receiving increasing attention in both the service economics and service computing communities. This trend is due to two observations:

1. From an economics viewpoint, services today are contributing the majority of jobs, GDP, and productivity growth in Europe and in other countries worldwide. This includes all activities by service sector firms, services associated with physical goods production, as well as services of the public sector.
2. From an ICT viewpoint, the evolution of the Internet enables the provision of software-as-a-service on the Web, and is thus changing the way distributed computing systems are being architected. Software systems are designed as service-oriented computing architectures consisting of loosely-coupled software components and data resources that are accessible using standard Web technology.

The notion of “service” used in both communities is different; however, they are not independent but have a strong symbiotic impact on each other. From an economics viewpoint services are increasingly ICT-enabled. Therefore, new ways of business process management, organization, productivity, and value co-creation emerge for service providers and service consumers. From an ICT viewpoint, the engineering and use of computing services requires careful consideration of the business and economical context, including business transformation aspects, market mechanisms, and social, organizational, and regulatory policies.

Services enable companies to spread the planning, design, manufacturing, distribution, and delivery functions of their products and services. Complexity created by rapid technological advances and the complexity of product design and manufacture has pushed modularization of corporate functions in a wide range of industries (electronics, car manufacturing, aerospace, retail, etc.). Modularization allows standardization and markets for services providing those functions. Modularization is thus one of the leading causes for the predominance of the service sector in the world economy. Competitive markets evolve best of breed functions, which in turn encourage deconstruction of formerly vertically organized companies and industries into service systems, also referred as value networks, to capitalize on this advantage.

One of the key aspects distinguishing service systems from the traditional product-centric view is the importance of value co-creation, i.e. customers act as co-producers in the service provisioning process or as co-innovators in the evolution of services. The concept of service value networks captures this idea by modeling the business structures and inter-relationships and dependencies between service providers, consumers, and intermediaries (or enablers). They facilitate representation of flexible, dynamic supply and demand chains together with their social, technological, and economic context. Thus, service value networks are a promising conceptual framework to better understand and manage the operational, strategic, and technological challenges of business design and business alliance formation.

The goal of the seminar is to bring together service researchers and experts from the various relevant fields and discuss the different existing approaches to modeling service value networks, identify shortcomings and open challenges, and to suggest a research agenda that leads to a better understanding of the functioning of complex service systems.

In this context, the seminar should particularly focus on the influence of modern ICT on the innovation processes in service systems. This includes services provided via new communication channels (e.g. mobile devices), computing platforms and marketplaces that provide value-adding intermediary functionality, new service business models that take better advantage of ICT in general, and improved customer participation enabled by new forms of social software and Web 2.0 technology. Four topics are listed as those of particular interest: Economics, business and social aspects of service value networks: • Describing, analyzing and predicting the evolution of service value networks • Coordination and competition between service value networks (Service-oriented) ICT for service value networks: • Service-oriented computing for service value networks • Social and Web 2.0 technologies for service-oriented architectures and service communities

Classification

* Networks
* Complexity
* Optimization
* Software Engineering

Keywords

* Service Science
* Service Systems
* Value Networks
* Service-oriented Computing

The SSAIE Summer School brings together the best international experts on software and services and graduate students, young researchers and professionals from leading academic, research and industrial organizations across Europe and around the world.

In addition to high quality training, the Summer School helps forge a new research and scientific community on Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME). The Summer School fosters the free exchange of ideas and helps the participants to network and start new cooperative research projects.

The Summer School is organized by the Training and Summer School Collaboration Working Group CWG), that brings together projects of the IST SSAIE unit (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/home_en.html).

The School will be held in Heraklion, Crete from 16 to 19 June 2009. Visit the website for more information.

[http://www.ssme2009.tsl.gr ]