An Agile Agent-Oriented Method for Designing Large Socio-Technical Service-Ecosystems
The agile development of large sociotechnical systems appears to be now more feasible with the availability of service- oriented cloud computing although this results in a higher complexity level with respect to security and dependability in service ecosystems. Additionally, the communication between humans and software is more complex too. Developing system architectures that comprise proactive agents are a means to tackle that complexity. However, there is a lack of agile sociotechnical design- and development methods for generating agent-based architectures that get deployed on platforms as a service in Clouds. Such methods must be easy to comprehend and enactable in a pragmatic way. To demonstrate a suggested method, the presentation uses a running case based on an emergency healthcare-provision scenario in homes for elderly. This presentation addresses the state-of-the-art gap by questioning how to augment and modify existing agile best practices for enabling the design and development of large sociotechnical ecosystems with means of service-oriented cloud computing. The presenter hopes to receive inspiring input from industry practitioners that is useful for commencing with novel research into relevant and close-to-realite directions.
BIO: Alex Norta is currently a research member at the Faculty of Informatics/TTU and was earlier a researcher at the Oulu University Secure-Programming Group (OUSPG ) after having been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his PhD degree (2007) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research interests include business-process collaboration, workflow management, e-business transactions, service-oriented computing, software architectures and software engineering, ontologies, mashups, social web. At the IEEE EDOC’12-conference, Alex won the best-paper award for his full research paper with the title “Inter-enterprise business transaction management in open service ecosystems”.