MODELLING COLLABORATIVE SERVICES

The COSEMO Model

Thanh Thoa Pham Thi

, Thang Le Dinh

School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada

Markus Helfert

, Michel Leonard

School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

Department of Information Systems, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Keywords: Service Modelling, Collaboration, Sharing Data and Processes, Collaborative Services.

Abstract: Despite the dominance of the service sector in the last decades, there is still a need for a strong foundation

on service design and innovation. Little attention has been paid on service modelling, particularly in the

collaboration context. Collaboration is considered as one of the solutions for surviving or sustaining the

business in the high competitive atmosphere. Collaborative services require various service providers

working together according to agreements between them, along with service consumers, in order to co-

produce services. In this paper, we address crucial issues in collaborative services such as collaboration

levels, sharing data and processes due to business interdependencies between service stakeholders.

Subsequently, we propose a model for Collaborative Service Modelling – the COSEMO model, which is

able to cover identified issues. We also apply our proposed model to modelling an example of Travelling

services in order to illustrate the relevance of our modelling approach to the matter in hand.

1 INTRODUCTION

Service science has emerged in the last few years as

an interdisciplinary research domain that addresses

challenges in service innovation in the service

sector. The service sector includes all economic

activities whose output is not a tangible product and

is generally consumed at the same time it is

produced and provides added value in intangible

forms (Quinn et al., 1987). Today, more and more

business organizations have been seeking

collaborations as one amongst solutions to sustain

their business in high competitive environments. For

instance, they use the supply chain model or alliance

model. In such context, collaborative service is a

kind of business collaboration in the service sector

in which several business organizations work

together to co-produce services.

Although the dominance of the service sector in

recent years, a strong foundation on service design

and innovation is still needed (Bitner et al, 2008).

Service

modelling is undertaken in the service

design and innovation. Service modelling amounts

to the representation of relations between what is

provided to customers, how it is provided, the

technical definition of the service, and resources

needed for operating the service (Vilho Raisanen,

2006). Therefore at the informational level, service

modelling should describe the creation and

transformation of information between service

stakeholders.

Due to data and process sharing in the

collaboration context, some critical issues have

emerged, such as various data sharing levels –

collaboration levels, and the consistency of data and

process sharing across organizations to ensure

correct performing of business activities.

Current approaches for service modelling often

focus on single services. There are few approaches

working on inter-organizational business process

collaboration. However, they do not cover issues

mentioned. In this paper, we propose our approach

for collaborative service modeling as a solution to

the matter in hand.

Thoa Pham Thi T., Le Dinh T., Helfert M. and Leonard M. (2010).

MODELLING COLLABORATIVE SERVICES - The COSEMO Model.

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, pages 79-82

DOI: 10.5220/0002929800790082

 SciTePress

The rest of the paper is organized as follows:

Section 2 dues with related work in service and

collaborative service modelling. Section 3 brings out

crucial challenges in collaborative services and

presents our modelling concepts that address these

challenges. Finally, we conclude our work and give

some research directions in Section 4

2 RELATED WORK

Services are defined as “the application of

competences for the benefit of another, meaning that

service is a kind of action, performance or promise

that is exchanged for value between provider and

client” (Spohrer, 2007).

In our viewpoint, collaborative services are

services created based on collaborations of service

co-providers. For instance, we take an example of

Travelling service for the illustration. A hotel

collaborates with a travel agency who provides

booking services to customers. Customers can

contact the travel agency for their booking or

cancellation, or they can also book or cancel their

reservation directly with the hotel. The hotel also

collaborates with a cleaning agency for the cleaning

service.

In literature, there are some approaches to

modelling single services which deals with only one

service provider and service consumer(s) such as

Molecular model, and Blueprinting approach.

Molecular model is one of the earliest models for

service and product modelling developed by

Shostack (Shostack, 1982). The centre of molecular

model describes core benefit provided to customers

which includes service elements, product elements,

relationships between elements, and service

evidences. These elements can be visualised with

graphical notations. Other elements such as price

strategy, distribution strategy, and advertisement

strategy, etc. are layers outside the core of molecular

describing the total market entity.

The blueprinting is also developed by Shostack

(Shostack, 1984) and then evolved by (Kingman-

Brundage, 1995), (Vilho Räisänen, 2006),

(Zeithaml, 2008) which has focused on processes

that constitute the service. A service blueprint is a

two-dimensional diagram. The horizontal axis

represents the chronology of processes or functions

in the service. The vertical axis represents different

processes areas.

Recently, the Business Process Modelling

Notation (BPMI, 2004) has been adapted for

collaborative business process modelling for the

Service Oriented Architecture design (Touzi et al,

2009).

Similar, (Grossman, 2008) has proposed some

extensions to business process modelling languages

which enable them to describe various types of inter-

process dependencies across organizations. They are

for example, Triggering dependencies, Enabling

dependencies, Cancelling dependencies, Disabling

dependencies.

In the Service Oriented Computing paradigm,

service composite and orchestration describe

aggregating multiple services into a single

composite service (Papazoglou et al. 2007). The

composite service is often modelled with Petri Nets

(Gehlot, Edupuganti 2009; Yoo et al. 2010).

These approaches have some limitations on

describing various collaboration degrees, monitoring

data consistency and monitoring shared processes

performed across organizations.

3 ISSUES IN MODELLING

COLLABORATIVE SERVICES

In this section firstly we present our meta modelling

concepts, then we address crucial issues in

collaborative services modelling and illustrate how

to overcome it with our concepts.

3.1 Modelling Concepts -

The COSEMO Model

We focus on data and process sharing between

organizations during the production of services. The

relevant concepts are as follows:

- Role describes organizational units inside/outside

an organization or participants in the collaboration

context

- Process is a business activity, a task or function

-Class represents information/data created/

transferred/transformed by process.

- Privileges on data: a role can have privileges of

creation on data (i.e. class), and privilege of

suppression, modification, reference on their own

data (data created by this role). Moreover, a role can

have privileges of creation, suppression, and

reference on data created by other roles. In this case,

they are denoted by suppression+, modification+,

and reference+

- Responsibility on process: a role has responsibility

on the performing of a process

- Available/Unavailable data: data in a class can be

ICSOFT 2010 - 5th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies

available or unavailable to certain processes in

certain times (i.e. is able to participate in the process

or is not). This often concerns data status changes.

For example a booking is available to the Cancel

and Confirm processes. If the booking becomes

cancelled (after performing cancel process), then it

is becomes unavailable to Cancel and Confirm

process. But a confirmed booking is available to

Cancel process.

In the following sections we will describe

challenges in collaborative service modelling and

illustrate with our concepts.

3.2 Collaboration Level Modelling

The collaboration level between organizations/

service providers is described by the degree of

sharing data and process. There are four

collaboration levels:

Figure 1: Very tight collaboration

Level 1 – very tight collaboration- data and process

sharing, it is allowed to modify the shared data.

Figure 1 illustrates this collaboration level with

the Travelling example. There are shared

information and common processes between the

hotel and the travel agency.

If a booking is made with the hotel then the

customer change booking information or cancel it

within the hotel. But if a booking is made with the

travel agency, then the customer can change booking

information or cancel it within the travel agency or

the hotel. Customer information created/owned by

the travel agency should be shared with the hotel,

but the hotel does not need to share information with

the Customer who directly booked with the hotel

(i.e. the hotel has the privilege reference+ on

Customer, but the travel agency just has the

privilege reference on Customer). The hotel can

modify Booking shared by the travel agency, but it

is not an inverse case (i.e. the hotel has privilege

modification+ on Booking, and the travel agency

just has privilege modification on Booking), and so

on.

Level 2 – tight collaboration- data and process

sharing, it is not allowed to modify the share data.

For instance, concerning travelling service, an

alliance of airlines shares the process of Bonus

Calculation for loyalty clients to each member. The

shared information between them for the performing

of this process is information on flights taken,

number of miles taken and concerning customer.

However, an airline can not modify this shared

information which is owned/created by other

airlines.

Level 3 – loose collaboration: actively data sharing,

it is not allowed to modify the shared data.

This case often concerns requesting other service

providers to carry out a business activity/process.

Figure 2 illustrates this level. For example, the hotel

shares occupied room data to the cleaning agency

for the cleaning service. Cleaning service just has

the only privilege of reference on occupied room.

Figure 2: Loose collaboration

Level 4 – very loose collaboration: passively data

sharing, it is not allowed to modify shared data.

A service provider passively shares some

information to other service provider for the

reference purpose, the shared information is not

allowed to modify. The receiver just has the

privilege of reference on shared data.

3.3 Data and Process Consistency

Control

Consistency issues emerged due to data and process

interdependencies among service providers.

MODELLING COLLABORATIVE SERVICES - The COSEMO Model

Figure 1 describes an exclusive constraint

between Check-in process and Cancel process which

span across organizations. Figure 2 describes a more

complex situation which means “for every room, if

the check-out process is performed then the clean

room process is disabled, but it is not the case on the

contrary”.

We uses the concept of Available/Unavailable

data in our model to solve this issue. In the first case,

Booking becomes unavailable to the Cancel process

and Check-in process once it participated in one of

these processes. Therefore, if a booking is cancelled,

later it can be checked-in, or vice-versa. Meanwhile

in the second case, Occupied room is always

available to the Clean room process, therefore an

occupied room after cleaning is still occupied, until

the Check-out process is performed.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Researchers have contributed some work on

collaborative business process modelling, composite

service and orchestration modelling. However, in

this paper we showed that there are still some

limitations on describing critical issues in

collaborative service modelling which concerns the

description of collaboration levels, data and process

consistency across organizations due to data and

process sharing needs. By addressing these issues,

we proposed our meta-modelling concepts, the

COSEMO model. This modelling approach is

business oriented, not a formalism oriented approach

like Petri Nets, therefore our approach avoids

complex transformation of modelling due to

constraints on formalisms.

Our future research directions will address the

need of investigation of customer-centric

characteristics of services. This allows the service

customization and adaptation of customers

according to their needs. The the modelling should

be an adaptable approach which facilitates evolution.

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