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business demand for value-driven service management. This also requires a better
integration of software services and business services [10] - which still is the vision
of service science anyway.
Along with SOA, the last decade has witnessed increased research efforts on self-
adaptive or autonomic software. We refer to [20, 4] for recent overviews. Self-
adaptive software embodies a closed-loop control mechanism that includes sensors
and effectors, linked through processes of monitoring, detecting, deciding and acting.
Despite considerable progress in sub areas, there are also still many challenges, in-
cluding the question on how to integrate self-adaptation functionality in the SOA
architecture. Is it possible to provide Management as a Service?
The control loop is taken by Forrester analyst Bartels as the backbone for Smart
Computing [1]. Smart Computing is supposed to be the challenge of the coming dec-
ade and integrates the following technologies: Awareness (sensors, RFID chips, video
cameras), Analysis (business intelligence, process mining), Alternatives (rule engines,
workflow systems) and Actions (leveraging existing products), with Auditability as an
overall concern. The big business challenge lies in optimizing the value of and the
return on assets and minimizing the costs and risks from liabilities by far better
real-
time
awareness of their status. Assets include both physical resources such as build-
ings and trucks, but also intangible ones such as software, or brand.
The research objective of this paper is to develop a general framework for man-
agement service design that covers both business services (as in Smart Computing)
and software services (as in Autonomic Computing). The framework must be value-
driven and truly service-oriented. To arrive at rigorous and relevant research results,
we use Peffers' design science phases [14]. The
problem identification and motivation
is stated in section 1 and 2. Our
solution objective
is to develop an integrated frame-
work for value-driven service management. In section 3 we lay a formal foundation
by extending the REA business ontology with a REA management ontology and in-
troduce a general framework of services that is applied recursively to management
services (
design and development
). The framework is used in two case studies (
dem-
onstration
). The first case was developed in the context of the S-Cube project [17]
and concerns an Italian wine industry. The advantage of using this case study is the
comparison it allows with other approaches. To explore the applicability range of our
approach, the second case is about a robot cleaner.
2 Related Research
Given limited space, we can only present a brief overview of all the relevant fields.
The vision of Autonomic Computing was presented by Kephart and Chess in 2003
[7], and recently evaluated in [4]. The evaluation observes that the vision has been
broadened to “the application of advanced technology to the management of advanced
technology” and as such is still highly relevant. A notable omission in the original
vision was the communication component, and research has been devoted to develop-
ing a so-called
knowledge plane
. What is also still lacking is an understanding of the
broader software engineering aspects of autonomic system development. This
includes such basic questions as when a system can be said to be “correct” if its beha-
vior is expected to change over time. [4] also pleads for a comprehensive systems
