Cinco: Collaborative and Interoperable Computing

CINCO Laboratory

Welcome to CINCO Laboratory!

The CINCO group 

The CINCO group (Collaborative and Interoperable Computing Group) works on a global architecture model that allows technology-agnostic solutions in composing business service into larger value nets dynamically, across enterprise or organisational boundaries. The approaches taken emphasise autonomy of organisations, strong encapsulation of business services and need of negotiation over enforcement in all business transactions. 

The potential application areas include areas where the critical need is in tolerating heterogeneity of organisations involved, changes in the technical level and in the busienss process level, and the need of operational time formation of collaborations and changing them. Areas where unquestioned trust between involved services, criticality of real-time operation, and single controller (of policies or workflows, for example) are not suited; power plants, missiles, and space shuttles are examples of nonsuitable targets. Instead, crisis management, healthcare districts, distributed production plants, company merges and strongly evolving innovative business domains  are good choises for applying the architectural solutions.

The research domain of CINCO group is where the domains of enterprise interoperability, service oriented computing, model-driven operation, reflective middleware, business and IT alignment, and service  governance overlap with complex adaptive system principles.

(Some additional keywords: 

  • distributed computing architectures, service oriented computing, self-organising systems, multi-agent systems, knowledge management, distributed artificial intelligence,
  • enterprise computing, enterprise interoperability, business intelligence, enterprise information systems, cross-organisational business processes, decision-support systems, enterprise/system/IT governance (and alignment)
  • enhancing security of system/service collaboration with trust and privacy-protection,  trust management, privacy management, reputation systems, 
  • distributed service-oriented software production,  model driven engineering and operation, software/service functional and extra-functional properties, system/service description languages, domain specific languages )

The CINCO Lab purposes

The CINCO Lab has a number of intertwined purposes: it acts as a teaching environment as well as a research platform and asset. It supports research and researcher education by providing tools, litterature, tasks and longer-running ecosystem projects into which researchers, students and external developers can join in at different times for different roles. The laboratory architecture provides means for the upkeep of separate dynamic ecosystems, so that results can be cumulated and reused.

A mature ecosystem has a membership of (real or imaginary) enterprises or organisations contributing business services and collaboration models for the use of the ecosystem members for repeatedly occuring contract-based collaborations that compose together services from the ecosystem to serve in the business processes that are declared as part of the collaboration model contracted. The collaborations mix and match the services by demand and depending on the business situation, governing rules and partner trust on the services on offer.

A more primitive ecosystem is designed for an individual business opportunity, and as commitment for shared business has taken place, business processes and services are designed, implemented and deployed.

Locations of materials

The current student exercises and thesis topics are introduced under the CINCO groups education pages. The externally visible projects are introduced under the CINCO groups project pages. Further, in the CINCO Lab facililies pages tutorials, tools, and litterature on specific ecosystem elements are made available. 

 

16.03.2015 - 14:42 Lea Kutvonen
11.10.2012 - 17:19 Webmaster