The COIN Book Enterprise Collaboration and Interoperability

Transcription

1 Patrick Sitek, Sergio Gusmeroli Marco Conte, Kim Jansson, Iris Karvonen (Editors) The COIN Book Enterprise Collaboration and Interoperability

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3 List of Authors Achilleas Achilleos (University of Cyprus), Juncal Alonso (TECNALIA), Leyla Arsan (LODER), Gorka Benguria (ESI), Du!an Bu!en (GIZ-ACS), Gulcin Buyukozkan (LODER), Vittorio Cannas (CANNAS), Davide Cerri (STI-Innsbruck), Otakar "erba (WirelessInfo), Karel Charvát (WirelessInfo), Karel Charvát jr (WirelessInfo), Elia Conchione (Soluta.Net), Marco Conte (ESoCE-Net), Enrico Del Grosso (TxT e-solutions), Brian Elvesæter (SINTEF), Jens Eschenbächer (BIBA), Andrew Faughy (VEN), Pierfranco Ferronato (Soluta.Net), Daniel Field (ATOS), Klaus Fischer (DFKI-GmbH), Pavel Gnip (WirelessInfo), Sergio Gusmeroli (TxT e- Solutions), Konstantin Hristov (FAVIT), Mikko Höynälänmaa (POYRY), Kim Jansson (VTT), Francisco Javier Nieto (ATOS), Aslihan Kagnici (LODER), Iris Karvonen (VTT), Mindaugas Kiauleikis (Kaunas University of Technology), Valentinas Kiauleikis (Kaunas University of Technology), Srdjan Komazec (STI-Innsbruck), Szabolcs Kátai (IND/IVSZ), Gerardo Lancia (FILAS), Man-Sze Li (IC Focus), Aurelian Mihai (University Polytechnic Bucharest), Alexandru Mihnea (University Polytechnic Bucharest), Nerijus Morkevi#ius (Kaunas University of Technology), Zoltán Mózes (IND/IVSZ), Alberto Olmo (ISOIN), Simon Oman (Polycom d.o.o.), Leire Orue-Echevarria (TECNALIA), George Papadopoulos (University of Cyprus), Antonio Panazzolo (Soluta.Net), George Sielis (University of Cyprus), Michele Sesana (TxT e- Solutions), Patrick Sitek (BIBA), Florian Skopik (Distributed System Group Vienna University of Technology tuwien), Fabrizio Smith (TxT e-solutions), Ioan Stefan Sacala (University Polytechnic Bucharest), Hannes Suttner (Siemens), Timo Syrjänen (POYRY), Jesús Sánchez (ISOIN), Francesco Taglino (CNR-IASI), Mehmet Tanyas (LODER), Drago Trebe$nik (Jo$ef Stefan Institute), Hong-Linh Truong (Distributed System Group Vienna University of Technology tuwien), Mikel Vergara (TECNALIA), Ingo Zinnikus (DFKI-GmbH) Thanks to all the Authors for their valuable contributions. I

4 Preface of the Series High performing co-operations between independent companies with the aim to develop and to realise customised products are an important success factor for the competitiveness of the European industry. Due to immense political changes and global markets, new ways of cooperations, so called enterprise networks, can be seen in addition to the traditional supply chains. These enterprise networks are often formed to realise a single customers order and play an important role during the conceptual phase (product design) as well as during the realisation phase (production). The Bremer Schriften zur integrierten Produkt- und Prozessentwicklung (Bremen scientific series for integrated product and process development) bases on the works performed by the research field ICT application for production (IKAP) from BIBA Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistics GmbH ( and on the works performed by BIK Bremer Institut für integrierte Produktentwicklung ( The research unit IKAP prepares, develops and realises methods and tools to support cooperative, inter-organizational enterprise networks. The research concentrates on efficient and effective collaborative design and production processes by applying innovative information and communication technologies (ICT). As focus can be seen the collaborative acting of enterprises during distributed design and production processes as well as during the late processes of the product life cycle such as the usage phase or the recycling phase. Additionally, the BIK research expertise is concentrated on the integrated development of products focusing on methods, tools and systems (like FMEA, QFD, CAD, CAE, and PDM). The main focus lies on products constructed by renewable resources, glass fibre or carbon fibre materials. The research results are integrated in the academic education of the next generation engineers (Production Enginnering, Systems Engineering, Engineering and Management) at the University of Bremen. Another application field of the research results are industrial projects where innovative approaches are transferred to practical problems. The institute is publishing the results of its work in a series. The objective of this series is to disseminate dissertations, project reports and proceedings of institute-hosted conferences to a larger circle of interested people. The Series Editors Prof. Dr.-Ing. K.-D. Thoben Prof. Dr.-Ing. D. H. Müller II

5 The COIN Integrated Project: a flagship project of the Future Internet Enterprise Systems domain The Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) Cluster 1 was launched in 2009 by the Networked Enterprise and RFID unit of the Information Society and Media Directorate-General as a follow-up to the work already accomplished in the domain of networked businesses. This innovative domain was considered necessary given the upcoming challenges for our European enterprises in the Future Internet era, in a context of increased globalization and competition. The Cluster inherited the very rich advancements of three research domains previously supported by the unit: Enterprise Interoperability, Enterprise Collaboration and Digital Ecosystems, but the domain has never lost its scope on the usage and integration of ICT by enterprises. Encouraging disruptive innovation, its mission remains to orient research priorities towards new business approaches and business values supported by Information and Communication Technology, where the Internet is the business ecosystem. After the first FP7 call for proposals, COIN became the flagship project of the FInES Cluster and one of its most ambitious, complex and wide-ranging projects. As the full name of the project Collaboration and Interoperability for Network Enterprise may suggest, its primary objective was to aggregate two separated areas Enterprise Collaboration and Enterprise Interoperability - developed by the precursors of the FInES Cluster. COIN rightfully observed that the two must be put together in order to have a coherent and efficient approach on the technology needed by our businesses. In this endeavour, the COIN partners gathered valuable research results from several EU funded projects that focused, however, solely on one of the two domains (see, for instance, the European ATHENA, INTEROP, ABILITIES, SATINE and TRUSTCOM projects on Enterprise Interoperability and the ECOLEAD, DBE, E4 or ECOSPACE projects on Enterprise Collaboration). One of COIN's most ambitious objectives is the provision of a universal service infrastructure capability based on the concept of the Interoperability Service Utility (ISU), 2 a concept of high importance for the FInES community. The ISU, already announced by the Enterprise Interoperability Research Roadmap version 4.0, 3 is destined to be a 'utility-like' interoperable technology capability that can be "invoked on-the-fly by enterprises in support of their business activities". The implementation of the ISU should play a key role in granting easy access for small businesses to the business ecosystem it supports, in line with the priorities for SMEs outlined in the Digital Agenda for Europe 4 and in the Innovation Union 5 Europe 2020 Flagship Initiatives. In this sense, COIN's potential achievements are of tremendous value, tracing the lines for further developments that the European Commission fully encourages. However, the numerous and ambitious objectives of COIN could not have been credible if they were an easy task to accomplish. It is our experience that projects aiming at building service platforms are bound to be confronted to serious obstacles. Furthermore, a project of the length (four years), size (twenty-nine partners) and complexity (seven sub-projects) of COIN meets even more unsteady grounds in conducting its research, having to deal with a continuous 1 and 2 The first Grand Challenge of the Enterprise Interoperability Research Roadmap [European Commission, 2006 and ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/ist/docs/directorate_d/ebusiness/ei-roadmap-final_en.pdf III

6 redefinition of the questions and needs it was trying to answer to. Moreover, the achievements of the COIN project, as well as the results of the FInES domain, are and will always be "work in progress". A work that can be a source of inspiration for all of us, interested in the evolution of applied technology. A work made of blood, sweat and tears reaching out to other communities. And for all these reasons, a work that needed to be written down and published. I would like to acknowledge the considerable efforts and the valuable substance that is offered by the COIN consortium through this book. I congratulate them for its realisation and hope that the reader will find it an interesting, helpful and rewarding introduction to the subject area of next generation service platforms. Cristina Martinez, Head of Future Internet Enterprise Systems cluster IV

7 Preface of the Volume This book presents the key results of the COIN Enterprise Collaboration and Interoperability project. COIN is an integrated project in the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme - EU FP7 Project , which has been running for four years from January 2008 to December COIN s dimension and impact is represented by its size of 32 industry, scientific and technological partners from Western and Eastern parts of Europe. The COIN book addresses the current state of the art and current practice, future scenarios and challenges for research and innovation of networking enterprises in the context of Future Internet Enterprise Systems. The COIN book is made of diverse parts following the projects main subprojects trying to cover the broad research results and recapitulate them to a manageable overview for an interesting reading. The COIN book describes the main parts of the developed COIN IT Systems as well as consolidated baseline and innovative Enterprise Collaboration and Interoperability IT-services. It describes the COIN demonstrators in the field of stable industrial Supply Chains, more dynamic Collaborative Networks and most dynamic Business-Innovation Ecosystems. One chapter is dedicated to discuss the approach to bring COIN to the market in order to force our philosophy about the importance of the correlation between the achieved research results and the business world. Looking at the COIN main outcomes, the value of the project is not only constituted by the numerous public research reports which are available through our website and about 330 international and national events that we have organized. To our conviction COIN results may also impact the EU and the Commission in terms of future work and research priorities in the field of Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES). The COIN consortium wishes to acknowledge all those who have contributed to our results. The work has been co-funded by the European Commission under the ICT priority within the 7th Framework programme. We are grateful to the EU project officer Cristina Martinez, Head of Future Internet Enterprise Systems cluster, who has full supported the project throughout four years of research work. Our thanks go also to the COIN review committee Alberto Bonetti, Wolfgang Reisig, Carles Sierra and Joseph Tah for professional and productive discussions and exchanges at anytime. Sergio Gusmeroli, COIN Project Coordinator TXT e-solutions SpA Corporate Research Manager V

8 Table of Contents 1 The COIN Motivation, Object and Vision COIN IT System... 7 VI 2.1 The COIN Generic Service Platform for Enterprise Interoperability and Collaboration Service Provision Introduction The COIN Generic Service Platform Semantic Execution Environment Agent-Based Negotiation Trust and Security Peer-to-Peer Registry and Repository Conclusion The COIN Front End for Generic Service Platform Federation Consuming Introduction GSP nodes and Services provisioning to the GSP Federation Consume the GSP Federation by a Human Oriented Interface Guiding User Semantic Search by Free Text Wishes Expression - JSI Conclusion The COIN Collaboration Platforms Federation for Enterprise Networks and Business Ecosystems Introduction Modelling, executing and outsourcing cross-enterprise collaborative business processes Extended Products and Distributed Collaborative Innovation in Virtual Factories Conclusion and Future Work COIN Enterprise Collaboration (EC) and Interoperability (EI) Services COIN research results for enterprise innovation - Enterprise Collaboration Baseline Services Introduction Related Work EC Baseline Reference Model Conceptual architecture Conclusion and key benefits COIN Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Services Introduction Methodology and Workplan Background and Previous Research Results - Overview of Developed Services Innovations Conclusions and Key Benefits... 65

9 3.3 COIN Enterprise Interoperability Baseline Services Towards Enterprise Interoperability services COIN EI framework Enterprise interoperability baselines COIN Innovative EI Services Introduction Information Interoperability services Process Interoperability services Knowledge Interoperability services Main innovation issues Conclusions COIN Demonstrators The COIN EI/EC Services in industrial Supply Chains An EI/EC Pilot in an Automotive Supply Chain Production Planning and Knowledge Interoperability Services in the Lazio Aerospace Cluster An EI/EC Pilot in a Railways Supply Chain (KTU) An EI/EC Pilot in a Construction Supply Chain (UPB) The COIN EI/EC Services in Collaborative Networks An EI/EC Pilot in Andalusia Aeronautics Cluster (ISOIN) An EI/EC Pilot in The Hungarian ICT Cluster (IND) An EI/EC Pilot in a Marine Shipping Network (UCY) An EI/EC Pilot in a Logistics Network (LODER) The COIN EI/EC Services in Business-Innovation Ecosystems An EI/EC Pilot in a Healthcare Ecosystem (VEN) An EI/EC Pilot in Pöyry business eco-system An EI/EC Pilot in an Agro-Food Living Lab (WirelessInfo) An EI/EC Pilot in a Digital Media Living Lab (FAVIT) COIN in the Business Supporting EC&EI service usability and take-up Introduction Barriers and Challenges for IT take up Development approach: Cross-teams Contributing to usability in EC &EI context Development of COIN take-up guidelines Conclusion Saas-U Value Proposition and Business Models Introduction Assumptions and Hypotheses ISU Value Proposition and Business Model VII

10 5.2.4 Conclusions Bringing COIN to the Market Challenges Logic adapted Development of business scenarios Type of Activity Scenarios in COIN Conclusion Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model The problem description Objectives and Use of the ECMM ECMM Design Process and Background COIN ECMM Structure and Description ECMM Application into End Users Conclusions Conclusions - The heritage of the COIN Integrated Project: how to move forward in the Future Internet Enterprise Systems domain VIII

11 Table of Figures Figure 1 The COIN Butterfly model... 8 Figure 2 COIN GSP Architecture Figure 3 Composed services in the COIN context Figure 4 - Main components and relationships in the TSD Platform Figure 5 - P2P Repository/Registry Architectural viewpoint Figure 6 - GSP evolution cube Figure 7 - COIN GSP model ontology stack Figure 8 - COIN Assets Download Figure 9 - GSP Model Configuration Figure 10 - nodes waiting for approval Figure 11 - The Web form for defining service pre-/post-conditions Figure 12 Generic User Functionalities Figure 13 - COIN Front-End deployment schema and COIN System upper Cloud interaction.. 26 Figure 14 - Browse & Search interface Figure 15 - detail of the semantic search results Figure 16 - from the left: try-me button form, trust values and COIN SMW for information on the service Figure 17 - FTWE pipeline Figure 18 - Enrichment services Figure 19 - Industrial User - CP Integration Step Figure 20 - Industrial User - CP Integration Step Figure 21 - Injection in the business process of a discovered service Figure 22 - Industrial User - CP Integration Step Figure 23 - GAP Identification - Flow diagram Figure 24 - COIN Step 2 Overview Figure 25 - Transformation Found Figure 26 - Available Transformations Figure 27 - Process Overview Figure 28 - automatic execution Figure 29 - Moving to an Extended Product Figure 30 - Evolution towards distributed, collaborative innovation Figure 31 - Extended products and collaborative distributed innovation in Virtual factories Figure 32 - EC Baseline Reference Model Figure 33 - Conceptual architecture of the COIN Baseline EC software services and tools Figure 34 - Example of decoupling of an existing software Figure 35 - Baseline IT Services Portal Figure 36 - COIN overall development strategy Figure 37 - Overview of developed services IX

12 Figure 38 - Healthcare sector ontology draft Figure 39 - Collaborative Production Planning Figure 40 - Example of meeting process and steps Figure 41 - Interoperability reference model Figure 42 - Baseline categories according to AIF Figure 43 Commercial Process Figure 44 - Technical process Figure 45 - Integration process for the legacy system users Figure 46 - Integration process for the non-legacy system users Figure 47 - Knowledge Interoperability Pilot Figure 48 - Collaborative Production Planning Pilot Figure 49 - Manufacturing process of VAE Legetecha (fragment) Figure 50 - University Politehnica of Bucharest COIN implementation strategy Figure 51 - The process of ordering materials from suppliers Figure 52 - The process of collaborative project planning and change management Figure 53 - The Andalusian Aeronautic Cluster main competences and entities Figure 54 Workflow example Figure 55 - Some COIN Innovative services tested. Collaborative 3D designer service (left) and Interoperability Spaces (right) have been tested, for product design and contract negotiation, respectively Figure 56 Challenges and COIN Expectations Figure 57 - Use Case 1: Formulating the Recap Pre-Fixture Document Figure 58 - Use Case 2 Creation and Settlement of the Proforma Disbursement Account (PDA) Figure 59 - Use Case 1 Formulation of the Recap Voyage Document using ProcessMaker Figure 60 - Initialisation of the recap document business use-case Figure 61 - Dincer Lojistik business network for collaborative transportation Figure 62 - The general business processes of Dincer Lojistik for use cases Figure 63 General development process for order transformation Figure 64 - Business Eco-System with actors in facility engineering projects Figure 65 - Accelerate transition to global operation and networked engineering Figure 66 - Interrelation of different knowledge levels Figure 67 Three Layers Architecture Figure 68 System overview Figure 69 - Architecture of Machine searching Figure 70 - COIN take-up process Figure 71 ISU Summary Figure 72 ISU Stakeholder Categories Figure 73 - Applying Competitive Models to the Supply of Utility Services Figure 74 - Core and peripheral assets Figure 75 - Value Chain for the core COIN technology X

13 Figure 76 - The complete value chain for COIN Figure 77 - Legend for value chain activities Figure 78 - Facebook Scenario Figure 79 Facebook Scenario Figure 80 - Open Source Scenario Figure 81 - Markeplace Scenario Figure 82 Franchise Scenario Figure 83 - ECMM Maturity Levels Figure 84 - ECMM Results: Comparison between the three companies XI

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15 1 The COIN Motivation, Object and Vision COIN Background Enterprise Collaboration (EC) and Enterprise Interoperability (EI) have represented for European Commission s FP6 research programme two of the major research domains in the field of ICT for Networked Enterprises (DG INFSO D4 Networked Enterprise & Radio Frequency Identification ) and aggregated tens of projects and hundreds of researchers in their projects initiatives. Research in Enterprise Collaboration comes from a business perspective and identifies the process of enterprises - mainly SMEs - to set-up and manage cross-enterprise win-win business relations in response to business opportunities. The aim is to find new paradigms for European enterprise aggregation, process synchronization and people co-operation in response to the more and more demanding and complex business opportunities coming from the global market. In order to fully exploit its tremendous potential, EC research not only aims at achieving important and relevant results from the scientific, organizational, business standpoint, but it also magnifies the investments on resources in the Information Technology (IT) implementation of the key collaboration processes and cross-enterprise applications needed to make collaboration easier and profitable. However, most of the completed EU funded EC research initiatives have achieved significant results in the field of IT support to collaboration management and performance management, but they couldn t address properly the problem of Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI). Research in Enterprise Interoperability originated by the IT world and identifies the capability of enterprise software and applications to be integrated at the level of data, applications, processes and models. Enterprise Interoperability started from an IT perspective of Enterprise Application and Software interoperability and focused on enterprise modelling, architecture and platforms, ontologies and semantics as the basic pillars for EI. This research stream proceeded very well in an analytical way to deeply investigate the various interoperability problems which affect European enterprises and has come out with a set of solutions for Enterprise Models Interoperability, Cross-organizational Business Processes, Semantic Business Document Reconciliation, IT Service selection and composition and Model-driven Architectures. However, EI solutions so far have been proved as efficient and effective in the IT and research community but have some way privileged in their field adoption the big enterprises while there is a tremendous need for EI efficient and effective solutions in the SMEs environment and in some less IT-developed sectors. Moreover, it seems that EI solutions so far lack flexibility and adaptation to different business scenarios and collaboration forms like Supply Chains, Collaborative Networks and Business Ecosystems. Hence, it is evident that research in EC lacks the adoption of innovative and advanced IT architectures and tools, while research in EI lacks best practices, clear business justification mostly for SMEs and real-life collaborative business applications. In synthesis, it is true that EC and EI are different concepts which cannot be merged, confused and mixed up, but that they are so interdependent, interconnected and simultaneously present in every networked enterprise, that they can be really considered as the two sides of the same coin! COIN Motivation Since more than a decade, the adoption of advanced Information Technology methods and tools has been considered one of the strongest competitive advantages for collaborative enterprises. However, so far EI/EC solutions in networked enterprises have mostly been implemented in hierarchical static supply chains, by forcing the installation and adoption of the same IT solutions 1

16 in all networked enterprises. But what happens in the presence of less hierarchical collaboration forms like in innovation ecosystems or when SMEs simultaneously belong to different supply chains and cannot simply adopt one single IT solutions. Networked Enterprises simply need more flexible and adaptable EC and EI solutions. On the other hand, the advent of Internet and the so-called Service Web has introduced unprecedented opportunities for e-commerce and e-business processes: the Internet has become a Universal Business System and service oriented architectures have completely revolutionised the traditional software engineering methods and tools. How to implement this huge potential for innovation in the field of EI/EC among networked enterprises? Networked Enterprises need more simple and easy to use access to Internet web services. So, there is a more general question which says How to bridge the gap between Business and IT, making the Internet of Services easily accessible and integrated in business processes? and a more specific question which focuses the topic to EI/EC: How could networked enterprises have access and easily use the most advanced web services available in the Internet to solve their Interoperability and Collaboration problems? The EI Cluster [13] in its research roadmap v 4.0 identified in the implementation of the ISU (Interoperability Service Utility) Grand Challenge a way to provide all enterprises, including SMEs, with a basic set of Interoperability Services to implement their collaborative business. Such an ISU was conceived both as a utility infrastructure (i.e. a service delivery platform for basic fundamental services) and as a set of innovative business models accompanying it. The fundamental motivation of the COIN project was the urgent need by collaborative business processes to easily access-compose-orchestrate-execute EI/EC services available to all in the Internet at a very low cost and under guaranteed service levels; in one sentence to implement the ISU and its most relevant business models applied to EI/EC services for any form of more or less hierarchical networked enterprise. COIN Project 2020 Vision Statement By 2020 enterprise collaboration and interoperability services will become an invisible, pervasive and self-adaptive knowledge and business utility at disposal of the European networked enterprises from any industrial sector and domain in order to rapidly set-up, efficiently manage and effectively operate different forms of business collaborations, from the most traditional supply chains to the most advanced and dynamic business ecosystems The COIN Vision (COIN DoW) implies that in 10 years time, Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration services will be commoditized and factorized in the Internet of the Future as a set of Utility Services, available to all enterprises at a very low or zero cost and under non-discrimination and non-exclusivity policies: Interoperability and Collaboration as Public Services. From an IT architectural viewpoint, the COIN Vision implies that commercial Enterprise Systems of the future [13] should focus on the most added value services they could provide (e.g. supporting supply chains, customer relationships, product life cycle, financial and HR issues, in one word supporting Business Innovation) and leave the most commoditized IT services to the Future Internet open platforms developers. The COIN Vision is in agreement with the most recent EC policies and in particular with the Digital Agenda for Europe [12] which identifies 7 key themes to be solved in order to build the European Digital society. One of these pillars is: Interoperability and Standards: a digital society can only take off if its different parts and applications are interoperable and based on open platforms and standards. 2

17 From a business viewpoint, the distinction between Value Added (pay-as-you-go) and Utility (free) services is stimulating the development of innovative business models bundling Value Added services and Utility Services in a very similar way the media industry is bundling free and premium services. The latest outcomes of COIN business research show however that the full adoption of so called SaaS-U business models (merging SaaS and Utility models) will be effective for EI/EC services just starting from 2020, when Value Added services could be onthe-fly and dynamically selected in the private clouds by Enterprises and therefore the need of standardized EI/EC services available in the open clouds will become essential. Moreover, the present perception in COIN is that in the current business and market landscape for providing enterprises with just EI/EC Utility Services is not guaranteeing the IT providers with the necessary economical returns from the needed huge investments in ICT, according to the current costs of Cloud Computing and similar infrastructures. By 2020, thanks to the implementation of the Digital Agenda for Europe, it is supposed that current obstacles hindering the implementation of the COIN 2020 Vision (e.g. EI/EC services hard-wired, high costs to set-up a cloud service infrastructure, low bandwidth and network performance, predominance of on-premises monolithic solutions, huge availability of EI/EC services/information in the open Internet, legislative and regulatory issues which will combat monopoly positions and support open specifications and open standards) could disappear and make the provision for the ISU profitable also from a mere economic point of view. The COIN Metaphor The COIN coin metaphor is also useful to describe the 5 major research topics of the project: The SIDE A of the COIN: Enterprise Collaboration. The COIN Project develops innovative services for enterprise aggregation, synchronization and co-operation, adaptable to any collaboration form and suitable for SMEs needs. COIN will develop innovative services for Enterprise Collaborative in Product Development (c- PD), Collaborative Production Planning (c-pp), Collaborative Project Management (c- PM), as well as in Human Centric Collaboration (c-hi). The first three group of services directly support the corresponding collaborative operational functions; product development, production planning and project management, while the forth group of services are more general and not specifically dedicated to a business function. The c-hi services encompass services for human collaboration and data sharing and can be utilized as supporting services, for example in c-pd, c-pp and c-pm. The EC services are explained in more detail in chapter 3 of this book [4][5][6][7] The SIDE B of the COIN: Enterprise Interoperability. Enterprise Collaboration is a term that describes a field of activity with the aim to improve the manner in which enterprises, by means of information and communications technology (ICT), interoperate with other enterprises or organisations to conduct their business. In the COIN context, EI services provide functionality for applying IT solutions that overcome interoperability gaps between two or more enterprises and thus enabling them to set-up and run collaborations. The COIN Project provides innovative integrated-unified-federated solutions for bridging interoperability gaps at the level of data, service, process and knowledge. The main goal of the EI services is to reduce the costs of data reconciliation, systems integration and business processes synchronization and harmonization. The COIN project adopted the ATHENA EI reference framework [1] which addresses interoperability at different levels, by using two main approaches (i.e., model-driven and semantics-based) The EI services are explained in more detail in chapter 3 of this book [8, 9 and 10] 3

18 Interoperability at the information/data level is related to the exchanging and sharing business documents among organizations, by filling interoperability gaps related to the format and content and to the messages and/or structures to be exchanged. Interoperability at the service level is concerned with discovering, ranking, selecting, composing, orchestrating and executing various applications implemented as a service. Interoperability at the process level is the capability to make proper external views of enterprise internal processes synchronised by a collaborative inter-enterprise business process. Interoperability at the knowledge level should be seen as the organisational and operational ability of an enterprise to co-operate with other, external organisations in spite of e.g., different working practices, legislations, cultures and commercial approaches. For both sides of the coin, COIN s main objective here is i) to be the catalyst of previously developed EI/EC services, by harmonising their semantic descriptions and by supporting their registration into the same web site and discovering mechanism and ii) to develop innovative EI/EC services, extending the available ones with new methods, techniques and functions, as for instance the implementation of a federated interoperability platform or the integration of social networks in collaboration. The Metal of the COIN: Generic Service Platform. The COIN Project develops a pervasive, adaptive service delivery platform to host COIN services for Enterprise Collaboration and Enterprise Interoperability. A generic Semantically Enabled Service Architecture has been customised for the EI/EC domain and empowered with peer-to-peer, trust & security and intelligent reasoning / negotiation capabilities. Here the objective of COIN is to develop an open-trusted federation of service delivery platforms, namely the ISU (Interoperability Service Utility) aimed at making accessible, browsable, composable and executable from a single one-stop-shop the myriad of EI/EC services developed not only in COIN but in any other research project or standardisation/commercial initiative. In the Future Internet (FI) perspective, the objective is to integrate such a federation with the FI Core Platform and its Generic Enablers, with the final aim to develop a set of Enterprise-oriented utilities and to realise the vision of FI as the Universal Business System. [3] The Generic Service Platform that has to provide COIN with a platform with a reliable layer for models and services. Regarding the interaction and interoperability with other COIN components, the Evolutionary and Pervasive Service Platform is simply seen as a Web Service, that holds information that is critical to the functioning of the COIN services and models. The pervasiveness of the platform is accomplished through the usage of a decentralization technique; the information is distributed and replicated in a set of connected nodes. The peer to peer protocols are a valuable technology for the organization of the information and for the communication infrastructure. In a peer to peer network the information is shared across the members of the community (represented by nodes) and it is not under the control of a single institution or organization. This approach is a promise for true equality; there is not a single point of failure inside the network and hence the services are more reliable. The Value of the COIN: Software as a Service Utility 4

19 The COIN project supports the establishment of business models for interoperability service utilities that will match current market condition and completion. The Information Technology vision of Software as a Service (SaaS) finds its implementation in the field of interoperability among collaborative enterprises, supporting the various collaborative business forms, from supply chains to business ecosystems, and becoming for them like a utility. In order to describe, reason and where possible assess change on different levels, the COIN research into EI Value Proposition needs to integrate the relevant key developments [11]. There are of course different schematics for integrating and characterising those developments. Given that the overall context for COIN is enterprise networking, the research will be concerned with developments that are ICT based and/or ICT enabled. In conformity with the vision and mission of COIN, the research is particularly concerned with market developments and trends with reference to the themes of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Interoperability Service [as] Utility (ISU). SaaS is a market reality while ISU is a research challenge premised upon a re-structuring of the current Internet. The notions of interoperability and collaboration are changing in perspective and scope as a result of both market reality and new research orientation towards a Future Internet. On the basis that the Future Internet represents the future of ICT, this could be elaborated as the Future Internet will provide a critical infrastructure for all enterprises, which is itself an articulation of the FInES Cluster vision of the Internet being a universal business system. The basic assumptions are that the Future Internet represents the future of ICT, this could be elaborated as the Future Internet will provide a critical infrastructure for all enterprises, which is itself an articulation of the FInES Cluster vision of the Internet being a universal business system. Enterprise processes will be subject to increasing commoditisation and IT capabilities will be subject to increasing contextualisation in order to better serve business needs. The Market of the COIN: Manufacturing Enterprises, mainly SMEs. The COIN original project encompasses six industrial test cases in different domains (Automotive, Space, Aeronautics, Healthcare, ICT, Plants Engineering). The test cases have been extended to twelve, by adding new six domains coming from the so-called Enlarged Europe (Marine Shipping, Railways Components, Agro-food, Civil Construction, Logistics & Transport, Media). All the developed constituents of the COIN metaphor need to be deployed and adopted in realistic business scenarios and carefully evaluated in their business benefits and exploitation potential. To achieve this objective, specific attention is being spent in COIN to cover the different industrial sectors, European Countries, application domains, EI/EC heterogeneous requirements and legacy systems and applications. References [1] Advanced Technologies for Interoperability of Heterogeneous Enterprise Networks and their Applications (ATHENA) - IST FP6 - Integrated Project [2] Grant agreement for Collaborative Project, FP7 IP COIN Large-scale integrating project, Annex I - Description of Work [3] COIN deliverable D3.2.1b - Evolutionary and Pervasive Service Platform,

20 [4] COIN Deliverables D4.2.1b - cproduct Development Services, 2009 [5] COIN Deliverables D4.3.1b - cproduction Planning Services, 2009 [6] COIN Deliverables D4.4.1b - cproject Management Services, 2009 [7] COIN Deliverables D4.5.1b - chuman Interaction Services, 2009 [8] COIN Deliverables D5.2.1b - Information Interoperability Services, 2009 [9] COIN Deliverables D5.3.1b - Knowledge Interoperability Services, 2009 [10] COIN Deliverables D5.4.1b - Business Interoperability Services, 2009 [11] COIN deliverable D6.2.1b - Integrated EI Value Proposition, 2009 [12] DAE: A Digital Agenda for Europe, EUROPEAN COMMISSION Communication from The Commission to The European Parliament, The Council, The European Economic and Social Committee and The Committee Of The Regions Brussels, COM(2010) 245 final/2 [13] FInES 2010: Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) Research Roadmap FINAL REPORT, June

21 2 COIN IT System The COIN system is a complex cross-enterprise environment encompassing several different components, platforms and services, which could be represented as a double cloud (COIN butterfly) visible in Figure 1. By mission, COIN aims at attracting as many EI/EC service providers and as many EI/EC service consumers as possible, becoming this way the reference service platform for EI/EC services. This means that the architecture of COIN system should be open, evolutionary, scalable, incremental, so that to become a catalyst for those who want to publish their services (according to their standards and business models) and those who want to access EI/EC services from the open Internet. During and after the COIN project life time, additional nodes have been and will be added to the initial COIN configuration, by integrating contributions coming from external sources (e.g. research projects like SOA4ALL 6 and DEN4DEK 7 or business-oriented initiatives like ITA - Information Technology for the German Automotive Industry - or GENESI DEC - Digital Earth Community -), this way experimenting and assessing the openness, scalability and interoperability of our technical choices. The COIN Integrated System is a federation of Platforms, Services and Web Interfaces which allow EI/EC Services to be searched, discovered, ranked, orchestrated and executed by crossorganizational business processes. There are three basic components of the COIN system, which could be interfaced in several different ways: A COIN Generic Service Platform (GSP) which is an open source instantiation of a generic SESA (Semantically Enabled Service Architecture), specialized in the EI/EC domain, and empowered with advanced capabilities for trust & security, distribution & scalability, reasoning & negotiation. A constellation of COIN EI/EC Services which are able to implement state-of-the-art and innovative technologies to support information, knowledge and business interoperability as well as Human Collaboration in a collaborative business context of Product Development, Production Planning and Project Management. A COIN Collaboration Platform (CP) which is a generic open source web portal encompassing Social Networking interaction, Knowledge Assets accession and Business Process management in a unique integrated multi-enterprise collaboration environment customized for more or less hierarchical organizational networks. The COIN Integrated System Butterfly Model represents the complete vision of the COIN system integrating the previous identified basic components with the work provided in the final part of the project. The focus of the work, apart the empowering of basic components, is the integration and consumption of them through a more general vision of the system including several users and methodologies. The model is made of two distinct clouds, one for service provision (upper cloud) and the other for service consumption (lower cloud), being also supported the pro-sumers case; in the middle is the integration software allowing the communication among the two clouds and the service consumption by other kind of actors. 6 Service Oriented Architectures for All, 7 Digital Ecosystems Network of regions for (4) DissEmination and Knowledge Deployment, 7

22 Figure 1 The COIN Butterfly model A first upper cloud of open COIN and non-coin service delivery platforms (providing utilities for service development, registration, publication, search & discovery, orchestration & execution) federated by EI/EC interoperable ontologies forms the COIN Upper Federation, which could be seen as a subset of the Future Internet of Services core platform (or Interoperability Service Utility) devoted to provide Smart Applications with common EI/EC commodities like human interaction, data mapping, service reconciliation and process synchronization functions. A second lower cloud of domain- and sector-specific COIN and non-coin Collaboration Platforms provides Supply Chains, Collaborative Networks and Business Innovation Ecosystems with advanced EI/EC services supporting the whole product/service life cycle and collaboration phases, integrating legacy systems and data, constituting this way the COIN Collaboration Federation, a part of next generation FI-based Enterprise Systems (FInES). A third component is the integration software which is called COIN Front End and it is a plugin either for the service delivery or for the collaboration platform, depending on the case. The scope of this component is to provide the communication among the two clouds and a set of services for the consumption of the capabilities of the upper cloud for users not facing the system from the lower cloud. Four main typologies of users could access the COIN System: 8 i. Individual users (humans COIN Front End) who are browsing the content of the GSP and of the CPs (e.g. configuration, nodes federation, services, business models, various info);

23 ii. IT users (humans COIN Front End) who are able to build and develop their own solutions (with or without the help of COIN platforms) and to link them to the COIN IT System; iii. Industrial users (humans and/or automatic business processes COIN Front End and lower cloud) who are able to model and run their business processes in collaborative enterprise environments (supply chains, collaborative networks, business ecosystems) with the help of the COIN System. iv. Federation Authority (humans COIN Front End) managing administrative issues of the upper and lower cloud federations. As depicted in the previous picture, the service delivery and collaboration platforms federations are made of COIN platforms and non-coin platforms. The COIN Platforms are platforms which are based on the COIN open source developments, developed inside the COIN project by our partners or by external third parties, for example in the community of COIN Multipliers. The non-coin Platforms are based on other service delivery and collaboration platforms and could be provided by COIN Multipliers as well. Utility and value-added COIN EI/EC services (Value Added Services) are available to both clouds: they are registered in the COIN service delivery platforms nodes to be discoveredcomposed-executed inside the upper cloud federation, they can be downloaded and integrated with COIN collaboration platforms in order to be directly targeted by Industrial Users. 9

24 2.1 The COIN Generic Service Platform for Enterprise Interoperability and Collaboration Service Provision Srdjan Komazec1, Davide Cerri 1, Klaus Fischer 2, Ingo Zinnikus 2, Francisco Javier Nieto 3, Pierfranco Ferronato 4, Elia Conchione 4, Antonio Panazzolo 4 1 STI Innsbruck, Universität Innsbruck, Technikerstraße 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria {srdjan.komazec, davide.cerri}@sti2.at 2 DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Saarbrücken, Germany {klaus.fischer, ingo.zinnikus}@dfki.de 3 ATOS Research and Innovation, Atos Origin, Capuchinos de Basurto 6, Bilbao, Spain francisco.nieto@atosresearch.eu 4Soluta.Net, via Edificio 2, Altivole, Italy {pferronato, econchione, apanazzolo}@soluta.net Abstract The COIN Generic Service Platform (GSP) represents the core pillar of the COIN system. The platform is founded on top of Semantic Web Service technologies and further extended in order to meet additional enterprise-level functional requirements in terms of trust and security, negotiation and composition capabilities and scalability. The platform provides the necessary capabilities for Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration service provisioning, and at the same time offers a fertile environment to implement novel service provisioning business models. This chapter sheds some light on the main COIN GSP components and their functionality Introduction The central role of the COIN system is to fulfill a variety of lower-level (i.e., technical) and higher-level (i.e., business) enterprise-level requirements for Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration service provisioning, on top of which original business models, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), can be implemented. In order to reduce difficulties in completing such a challenging vision, the COIN system identifies the main aspects that need to be covered. In particular, proper means to enable precise and automated goal-based discovery, selection and invocation of service offerings is the core of the infrastructure. Additionally, sufficient support to establish trust and security between the service provisioning stakeholders is needed. Furthermore, facilities to enable (semi-)automated negotiation of the service provisioning terms and policies, as well as composition of services are playing a significant role in this environment. The platform should also exhibit proper means to scale in a peer-to-peer fashion over service usage tasks exercised over resources contributing to the service descriptions (e.g., service discovery, ranking and selection and invocation). All those aspects are blended together in a platform called COIN Generic Service Platform (GSP), explained in the following sections The COIN Generic Service Platform The Web service technology stack allows exchanging messages between Web services (SOAP), describing the technical interface for consuming a Web service (WSDL), and advertising Web services in registries (UDDI). However, in traditional Web service implementations, the lack of information to express the meaning of the data and of the vocabulary referenced by the interface, as well as the lack of formalisation of the Web service behaviour, implies the requirement of human intervention in tasks such as Web service discovery, composition, ranking and selection, thus severely hindering the automation of the envisioned tasks. 10