Interactions in Service Provisioning Systems for Smart City Mobility

Services

Michael Strasser

, Nico Weiner

and Sahin Albayrak

Bosch Software Innovations GmbH, Sch

oneberger Ufer 89, 10785 Berlin, Germany

DAI Laboratory, Technical University of Berlin, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin, Germany

Keywords:

Service Provisioning, Service Roaming, Business Actions, Business Action Theory, Smart City, Service

Marketplace.

Abstract:

In times of smart city and internet of things and services a lot of data is produced. However, there is no

beneﬁt in collecting the data without processing it. Smart services are one possibility to enable data access

for data processing. Smart services have attracted research along their domain and requirements, beneﬁts

for the common as well as possible business models are developed. This work addresses the way how service

consumers and service operators conduct business in an open B2B service marketplace. The paper presents and

discusses phases of a business relationship in an digital service environment as well as discusses the business

actions’ sequence. A role-action framework for service provisioning systems is developed. It contributes

to a better understanding of service provision systems and demonstrates of what processes it constitutes. It

furthermore presents what needs to be done by the systems’ participants to offer or consume services.

1 INTRODUCTION AND

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

(Balakrishna, 2012) points out that the Internet is

developing towards a fully connected system which

connects things, objects and everything else which is

worth connecting. He forecasts that such intercon-

nectivity enables smart services to achieve the ﬁnal

goal of revolutionizing the interactions between peo-

ple and their environment. Smart services process

data in an intelligent way to increase economic and

social life. Therefore an appropriate infrastructure

equipped with sensors is required. However, accord-

ing to (Monzon, 2015), the infrastructure does not

make a city smart at all, but are prerequisite. Balakr-

ishna has identiﬁed that it is the combination of well

equipped infrastructure and appropriate applications

and services which makes a city a smart city. (Nam

and Pardo, 2011) add the cooperation of the parties

involved to the smart city equation. That applications

and services are designed to surpass domain and sys-

tem boundaries to access data for intelligent process-

ing. In conclusion, if sensor data is not accessible

and or not processed intelligently, a city will not be-

come smart. Research has shown that the status quo

for services is that i) services are currently available as

distributed, isolated and proprietary implementations

using different interfaces and protocols to access and

process speciﬁc data and ii) systems host special do-

main data but the number of smart services to process

that data by surpassing system and domain bound-

aries is low. A smart city solution provider (who

is a service consumer (SC) in the later marketplace

context) is currently forced to connect all those ser-

vice providers’ (which is the original service provider

(SP) in the later marketplace context) services which

deliver the required data or functionality. Each new

connected service can have a negative impact on the

solution’s complexity due to i) new service resources

require additional management and interface imple-

mentation, ii) more service invocations, iii) protocol

adaption if a different protocol is used and iv) compre-

hensive response aggregation. All this causes a lot of

effort and, according to Pfeiffer2014, leads to a com-

plicated network of bilateral agreements and links.

Having introduced the problem of smart service

provisioning, the rest of the paper is organized as fol-

low. Section 2 shortly introduces several service pro-

visioning approach currently discussed in academics.

Section 3 introduces the developed electronic service

marketplace (ESM) and presents an overview of its

characteristics. The contribution of this work is pre-

sented in Section 4 where the identiﬁed interactions

among the roles are discussed. An expansion towards

Strasser, M., Weiner, N. and Albayrak, S.

Interactions in Service Provisioning Systems for Smart City Mobility Services.

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2016) - Volume 1, pages 261-266

ISBN: 978-989-758-182-3

261

interconnected marketplaces and the applicability of

the elaborated model is presented in Section 5. The

paper end with an conclusion in Section 6.

2 APPROACHES FOR SMART

SERVICE PROVISIONING

Open Data Platform

One possible approach for smart service provisioning

for the mobility domain is presented by Tcholtchev

et al. who suggest an Open Data Platform (ODP).

This ODP consists of various servers which store all

kind of mobility related data. The data is provided

by the data owner who are the service providers. The

data is synchronized between all servers and an end-

customer request is answered by one of them. The

proposed ODP is not only Business to Business B2B)

but also Business to Customer (B2C) as end users

communicate with the ODP directly. The ODP offers

information alike a dashboard.

Cloud of Things

A Cloud of Things (CoT) is a similar approach to

the ODP and is proposed by (Yonezawa et al., 2015).

Their user-centric approach is able to manage and

store services along with their data. Due to a devel-

opment tool everybody is able to develop and share

a service. The COP holds all data and therefore the

power of what is done with it.

Open Service Platform

The Open Service Platform (OSP) approach suggests

to move all responsibility to the OSP. The OSP hosts

all services and their data. The OSP does also process

the service capabilities and stays in contact with the

end user (B2C). Participants give off their complete

business and their knowledge to the platform. Similar

approaches of an OSP is proposed by (Buchinger

et al., 2013; Masuch et al., 2013; Beutel et al., 2014).

What we envision is an environment of equal entities

and not one big system that is in the position to over-

rule its participants and to size the complete power. A

system or network of equals is desired which enables

them to conduct business. The business should con-

ﬁrm to well deﬁned commercial actions and interac-

tions. Interactions have to follow a deﬁned sequence

and the actions conducted have to be mapped to a spe-

ciﬁc role. Contracts need to be in place to manage the

roles responsibilities and the trade services.

3 MARKETPLACE APPROACH

FOR SERVICE PROVISIONING

Service Provisioning Marketplace

A service marketplace provides is an environment for

service providers and consumer to trade services. A

prerequisite for membership is a validation of each

participant. The provider offers and the consumer

consumers service capabilities. A service provider

publishes a service description (e.g. its capabilities

and conditions) to the marketplaces but keeps the ser-

vice and the data himself. This is different to the in-

troduced approaches of Section 2. The marketplace

stores data which was processed within its system. It

furthermore keeps a digital representation of the busi-

ness contract which indicates that two participants

have established a business relationship.

Service Roaming

Service roaming means service request roaming (also

known as routing). A service request triggered by an

end-user and received by a service provider is for-

warded via a marketplace to all contracted service

consumers. That is necessary because the service ex-

ecution is done by the service provider and thus out-

side marketplace system boundaries. This ensures

that each role keeps its responsibilities and the mar-

ketplace acts as a neutral intermediary or broker. This

is different from the approaches given in Section 2.

Smart Services in Marketplaces

Services exist in various areas, for example the public

and private transport domain, the smart grid, smart

home and smart city domain as well as in the au-

tonomous driving and intermodal routing domain.

The introduced electronic service marketplace (ESM)

is designed as an open marketplace. Open implies that

the marketplace welcomes services from various do-

mains. For simplicity reasons the paper focuses on

examples taken from electric mobility domain. The

ESM is the trading environment which, according

to (Alrubaiee, 2012; Strasser et al., 2015; Strasser,

2015) is required to enable multiple distributed ser-

vice providers and consumers to establish business re-

lationships and trade services. As the ESM on hand

is designed as an open marketplace every interested

service provider or consumer can obtain membership.

The ESM is able to host vertical but also horizontal

services, also called utilization services. A market-

place with a broad service landscape is attractive and

has positive effects for all its participants.

CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

262

Service Contracting

As business partners have to sign a contract,

anonymity is of no need within the ESM. They show

each other their capabilities to offer but more impor-

tant they present their lack and need. Trust is estab-

lished to the serious and reliable trading environment

- the marketplace. Each contract which is closed via

the ESM is a representation of a real paper contract. It

is a representative of a legal business relationship. Ac-

cording to (Grieger, 2003), it is feasible that an ESM

participant checks all service quotations ﬁrst and then

agrees on a service and its conditions. This is done

to get the best offer for the lowest cost. This ap-

proach might implies that business relationships are

often short-term. Contracts might become canceled as

soon as a better service quotation is found. This busi-

ness partner hopping calls Grieger spot sourcing. Our

service provisioning ESM is designed to be an envi-

ronment for participants which are interested in mid-

long-term B2B relationships lasting at least a year.

Therefore it is assumed that once an ESM participant

has found an appropriate service quotation with ca-

pabilities that satisfy his requirements, the digital and

the paper contract will not be canceled until its expi-

ration date - called systematic sourcing.

Service Roaming Example

The ESM’s operational concept is explained by fol-

lowing : An end user (ED) of service consumer A

(SCA) wants to use a charging station operated by

service provider B (SPB). However, SPB does not

know the ED. But SPB is registered with the ESM

and has a service contract with SCA. SPB forwards

ED’s charging request to ESM which in turn forwards

the request to all of SPB’s contracted business part-

ners. SCA recognizes EC and sends an acknowledg-

ment. This acknowledgment shows SPB that ED is

known by one of his business partners. Therefore

SPB authorizes the charging process and ED can use

the charging station. The ESM is designed and imple-

mented on the service oriented architecture (SOA) ap-

proach. This ensures system interoperability and sim-

pliﬁes access to distributed capabilities through well

deﬁned interfaces. The ESM acts as a man in the mid-

dle but in a positive way. This concepts is also called

broker (N

uttgens and Iskender, 2008; Elgazzar et al.,

2013), Clearing House (Pfeiffer and Bach, 2014) or

e-marketplace (Thitimajshima et al., 2015). Despite,

(Durante et al., 2000) who consider such an entity

to be short-living and speciﬁc for each transaction,

the elaborated ESM is involved in every single ser-

vice transaction and long-living. Without the ESM,

service roaming among the service trading partners

would only be possible through the establishment of

bilateral service links. However, this would make the

usage of the term roaming inappropriate. The ESM

simpliﬁes service provisioning and provides a well

scalable environment for B2B service trades. It re-

duces efforts put into the implementation and mainte-

nance of interfaces and protocols.

Resulting Architecture

Beneﬁts of a marketplace that enables the establish-

ment of a collective of service providers and con-

sumers and acts as a broker has been discussed by

(Strasser et al., 2015; Strasser and Albayrak, 2015).

Their propositions provide service consumers the

possibility to reduce the number of data links to their

service providers from 1:1 to 1:n. The ESM fosters

the idealistic vision of an interconnected ecosystem of

smart services. Changes in the service providers’ pro-

tocols are addressed by the ESM while the communi-

cation between ESM and its participants remains, in

best case, untouched.

4 BUSINESS PHASES AND

INTERACTIONS

Having explained characteristics of which the elab-

orated ESM is capable of, this section demonstrates

what actions have to be done to ﬁnally enable the

ESM to work as described. The ESM is able to man-

age business relationships which are necessary to con-

duct business seriously. To establish a business rela-

tionship via the ESM the participants have to consider

a special sequence of actions. These actions assure

commonplace business patterns and behavior. The ap-

proaches shown in Section 2 do not explain how the

involved parties in their scenario interact in particu-

lar and how they relate to each other. The following

grants insight into the internal processes of the ESM

regarding a complete service consumption life cycle.

Business Phases and Business Action Theory

(Goldkuhl, 1998) developed the Business Action

Theory (BAT) model. This conceptual model

supports the description of business interactions.

It consists of the six generic phases. Each phase

hosts various actions that are necessary to conduct

business. Because of its extended and ﬁne granularity

along with the conceptual approach, the BAT model

has been used to assign business phases to business

actions performed by ESM participants. All of

Goldkuhl’s phases are applicable to the ESM. This

implies that there is no difference between a digital

business relationship established via the ESM and

Interactions in Service Provisioning Systems for Smart City Mobility Services

263

its counterpart from the real world. Table1 presents

a comprehensive overview of actions that have been

identiﬁed as necessary to consume a service. The

fourth phase has been extended with two necessary

sub-phases.

Table 1: EMS related actions to BAT.

Phase Actions by SP, SC, both (B) or ESM

Business

prereq-

uisites

(I)

SP: Identify ability to offer speciﬁc capa-

bilities

SC: Identify lack and need for speciﬁc ca-

pabilities

B: Determine ESM with suitable capabili-

ties and service quotations

B: Register with ESM

M: Validate SP and SC

Exposure

and

contact

search (II)

SP: Create service offer quotation

SC: Create service search quotation

B: Active / Passive service search

B: Assess quotations according to own re-

quirements

Contact

establish-

ment &

proposal

(III)

B: Contact potential business partner

B: Negotiate terms and conditions for ser-

vice consumption

Contractual

(IV)

B: Sign paper contract with identiﬁed

business partner

B: Store digital contract within ESM

ESM: Validate contract

ESM: Establish service request roaming

Contract

Cancel-

lation

(IV-I)

SC: Cancel contract in case service does

not deliver what is promised

SP: Cancel contract in case payment is

missing or service consumption not valid

ESM: Cancel service request roaming

ESM: Adjust service data access accord-

ingly

Contract

Re-

Negotiation

(IV-II)

B: Re-negotiate terms and conditions for

extended service consumption

ESM: Update contract accordingly

ESM: Update service request roaming ac-

cordingly

Fulﬁllment

(V)

SP: Provide service according to contract

and ESM regulations

SC: Invoke service according to contract

Completion

(VI)

SC: Deliver service functionality or infor-

mation regarding the expected service ef-

fect SP: Pay for service consumption

ESM: Roam service requests according to

business relationships

ESM: Response aggregation and data edit-

ing (re-factoring)

ESM: Store processed data

B: Approach phase IV-I if not satisﬁed

with business partner or service

B: Approach phase IV-II if contract should

be extended

The rows represent the mapping of business

phases to corresponding participant actions. That

mapping demonstrate the harmonization and consis-

tency of participant actions with business theorems

used in the real world. The possibility to map the ac-

tions to acknowledged business phases proves that the

approach and its business interactions are serious and

reliable. The information presented in Table 1 depicts

core functionalities of the elaborated ESM. Compared

to the approaches in Section 2 which present high

level actions, Table 1 introduces the service consump-

tion life cycle in a very precise level. It provides great

insight into its operation and behavior of the elabo-

rated ESM. It is mandatory to emphasize that each of

the presented actions can be further subdivided. Fur-

thermore can the roles be divided into several addi-

tional roles. The ESM is built on or consist of various

roles. Each of these roles have speciﬁc sub-actions

which they have to perform according to a speciﬁc

action protocol. Due to this protocol all additional

(sub-)roles underlie deﬁned relationships and have it-

self well speciﬁed responsibilities. Table 2 outlines

an abstract of identiﬁed sub-roles of the EMS which

themselves perform certain actions and relate to other

sub-roles.

Table 2: EMS sub-roles involved in service life cycle.

EMS sub-role Intention

Technical Administrator ESM runs without down-

time

Business Administrator Supports participants

Technical Operator Develops new ESM capa-

bilities

Broker Roams requests between

B2B partners

Adapter Ensures data interoper-

ability

Reﬁner Increases data quality

Hoster Provides service hosting

Supporter Supports participants

Factors of an Electronic Marketplace

(Bakos, 1998) presents three factors an electronic

marketplace has to comply with. These factors are

1) matching buyers and seller, 2) facilitation of trans-

actions and 3) institutional infrastructure. At ﬁrst

glance, the factors and the business phases have noth-

ing in common. Though, once considered in de-

tail, they have similarities. Bakos combines Gold-

kuhl’s ﬁrst three phases within the ﬁrst factor match-

ing buyers and sellers. Bakos second factor facilita-

tion of transactions includes the last three of Gold-

kuhl’s business phases. The system environment is

pointed out in the third factor institutional infrastruc-

ture. Even though Bakos is not as precise as Goldkuhl

CLOSER 2016 - 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

264

according to business phases, his factors are more

precise regarding the complete electronic marketplace

paradigm.

Combining Phases, Actions and Factors

The role-action framework for service provisioning

systems is presented in Figure 1. It was especially

tailored for the ESM and is built on the suggestion of

(Strasser, 2015). The framework shows that the par-

ticipants’ actions and their sequence are in alignment

with the BAT.

Factor II

Factor I

Phase IV

Phase III

Phase I

Phase II

Phase V

Phase VI

Providers Consumers

Ability to

Provide

Capabilities

Lack and

Need for

Capabilities

Offers Demands

eMarketplace

Quotations

have

turns into

is translated into

have

are published

are made

public via

can lead to cancelation or reformulation

sell

capabilities

Business /

Contract

Business /

Contract

meeting of

mutual commitment

not accepted

by one party

Fulfillment

not delivered as promised

or not paid

can lead to modification,

cancelation or new offers

can lead to modification,

cancelation or new demands

Factor 3

buy

capabilities

has to result in

Factor 3

Figure 1: Role-Action framework showing business phases

and factors.

During phase I, every potential ESM participant

has to identify his capabilities. The identiﬁcation pro-

cess will probably unveil that the participant i) can of-

fer certain capabilities to other participants or ii) lacks

certain capabilities and therefore has to search for ca-

pabilities offered by other participants. Once the par-

ticipant is aware of his capabilities, it is necessary to

identify a source which is capable enough to manage

those capabilities. The introduced ESM is such sys-

tem. A potential participant can obtain the member-

ship in the second phase. However, actions of phase

I and II are tightly coupled. Then the participant can

either i) create a service offering quotation, ii) create

a service provisioning quotation or iii) screen all the

offer and provision quotations created by others. It

is necessary to distinguish the service quotations be-

tween a) public quotations which have been sent to all

ESM participants and b) quotations which have been

sent to uniquely selected participants. A participant

is able to accept exclusively offered and publicly of-

fered service quotations.

In phase III, potential business partners come to-

gether and negotiate the terms and conditions of their

future business relationship. A contract is signed dur-

ing phase IV. The paper contract is the legal represen-

tation of the partners meeting of minds. The digital

contract is required to establish the communication

between the partners via the ESM. It possible that one

of the business partners’ cancels the contract if the

outcome phase IV was not satisfying. This is done in

the sub-phase IV-I which is a sub-phase of phase IV.

A contract might get canceled in case the service does

not deliver what was promised in the contract or the

service consumption is not paid. The former reason

is believed as unlikely when the service provider has

described its service offer as precise as possible. Busi-

ness partners can also re-negotiate if they feel that the

terms and conditions are not appropriate. On the other

side is it possible to extend the contract duration. The

latter two can be done in phase IV-I which is a sub-

phase of phase IV. Phase V targets the availability of

the service and how the service has to be used by its

consumers. Phase VI hosts actions which are related

to service delivery and service consumption payment.

5 MARKETPLACE ECOSYSTEM

It is assumed that sooner or later constructs like

the EMS will face the same challenges as service

providers and consumers - and then they will form

alliances with other marketplaces. This will in-

crease their participants’ operation area without forc-

ing them into multiple registrations and memberships.

This will require adds another management level on

top of the current marketplace layer. The commu-

nication establishment and the information exchange

between marketplaces has to be deﬁned somehow,

as it was done for the communication between ser-

vice trading partners within the ESM. Some require-

ments might be equal or similar, others different. Ap-

proaching the BAT model to deﬁne the interactions

between marketplaces is recommended. The man-

agement of the marketplace network can be realized

applying a centralized managed architecture (Strasser

and Albayrak, 2015). In this case it is necessary to

expand and adjust the actions as the participants will

not longer be restricted by the system boundaries of

the marketplaces they are registered with. Intercon-

nectivity among marketplaces enables to explore ser-

vices which have been announced at foreign market-

places. The establishment of a business relationship

across system boundaries provides certain challenges

to the marketplaces but also to the ecosystem man-

agement.

Interactions in Service Provisioning Systems for Smart City Mobility Services

265

6 CONCLUSION

The authors have introduced their ESM approach

for B2B service provisioning along its operation and

functionality. The applied BAT methodology with its

resulting role-action model has proven that the busi-

ness relationships established and managed via the

ESM are serious, respectable and comply to com-

monsense business. The models demonstrate that the

ESM relies on clearly deﬁned phases with sequen-

tially arranged actions. The presented actions pro-

vide a deep insight into the elaborated ESM capabil-

ity stack. These capabilities are considered as critical

success factors and thus inﬂuence the success of the

EMS. The work provides an abstraction of the com-

plex relationship between roles, phases and actions in

a service marketplace. The abstraction in alignment

with real world business phases and supports to un-

derstand the underlying principles of service trades.

Because of the easy use of the elaborated ESM and

its beneﬁts, it is assumed that such a system can ac-

celerate and support the aspiring vision of smart cities

and a service provisioning ecosystem.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This works has been conducted within a project (sup-

port code 16SBB007C) funded by the German Fed-

eral Ministry of Economics and Technology.

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