CINCO group mission

The CINCO group mission is to develop solutions for service interoperability and management of dynamically formed business service collaborations and peer communities.

Vision

In future, individual users, enterprises or public organizations can easily compose new services from open service markets, or establish temporary collaborations with complex peer relationships. Furthermore, these contract-governed collaborations can be managed by all involved parties. All this is supported by a global infrastructure with facilities for interoperability control and contract-based community management (establishment, control and breach recovery) among autonomous organization;  this infrastructure also takes responsibility of governing trust and privacy-preservation issues.  The support environment is complemented with service-oriented software engineering practices that enable semantic and pragmatic interoperability management.

Values 

The design choices made in all CINCO group results reflect the following principles.

• A conceptual bridge must be built between business/social processes for collaboration management and the corresponding infrastructure support.The solutions are evaluated against both the improvement in operational time support by the infrastructure and the associated effects in the software and model production methods and tools. The operational and production time environments become merged in a large extent.
• The infrastructure services must support change management in enterprises, collaborative system evolution, and change management at the service market level. The kind of collaborations and communities created will always have the need to change and evolve; the facilities provided by computing and communication platforms will always be changing.
• We choose to use an open service market model instead of a closed strategic network environment. This is to enable especially small enterprises or individuals to increase their network in a controlled manner.
• All solutions reflect aspects of autonomy of participants, contracting, trust formation, and privacy-preservation.

Activities 

The research issues under active study by the CINCO group include

• eContract management infrastructure, including service discovery and selection support, contract structures and refining negotiation protocols, monitoring of contracts, and breach discovery and recovery solutions;
• service type safety support, including technical, semantic and pragmatic interoperability in federated environments;
• reputation-based trust-management;
• privacy-preserving business transactions with a clarified bridging between business process needs and technical level solution traditions;
• service-oriented software engineering methodologies and tools, including modeling of business process aggregations, services and relaxed/semantic matching of services to process roles.

The working methods in the group combine conceptual development with prototype trials on the suggested infrastructure services and tools. In addition, formal methods and verification techniques are applied where suitable. As ways of disseminating results, case studies with enterprises are sought for.

As the impacts of the CINCO group work -- as part of the international research trend on the area -- address a global architecture, it is essential to address activities on education and research forums. The CINCO group provides courses, seminars, and PhD and MSc thesis advisory on the above mentioned research issues, and works toward integrating this educational program to an international curricula. The research forums include international workshops, conferences, and journal themes on the area, both for research community and for researchers and enterprises to mix.