Considerations on Modeling Service Ecosystems

Nowadays there is a trend of movement of many enterprises from product-driven business models towards networked service-centered business models for increasing their revenues and creating sustainable service ecosystems. A service ecosystem is a socio-technical complex system that enables service-based cooperation between entities. It consists of a nesting of infrastructures, institutions, service systems, and contexts. This paper discusses about the definition of the main architectural elements of service ecosystems and existent modeling approaches to achieve a required quality based on specific properties. It begins with the identification of the main challenges in this domain and addresses solutions that facilitate analysis and design of service ecosystem models including ecosystem infrastructure and knowledge repositories. It compares several definitions of ecosystems and related concepts used to provide service innovation and co-creation of value. Decision making in co-creative ecosystems is distributed both horizontally and vertically. Furthermore, lines of authority and governance structure are less distinct than in traditional views of business organizations. Joining an ecosystem requires interoperability knowledge. Under this perspective the paper discusses about knowledge management in an open context addressing specific ontological relationships between concepts. The importance of interoperability models has been recognized in the context of ecosystems and several levels have been introduced and defined. Among these can be mentioned conceptual, behavioral, semantic, communication and connection. The last part of the paper pays attention and analyses existent methods and tools for service ecosystem engineering. It discusses about and ecosystem architecture framework and a modeling methodology for creation of agile services engineering platforms.