The document discusses the urgent need for rethinking organizations, particularly in the context of service-oriented communities and fractal social organizations. It identifies three key requirements: engaging society as a resource, developing open and smart organizational structures, and promoting adaptive behaviors to enhance resilience. The conclusion emphasizes the potential of these models to address challenges in various domains, including healthcare, and highlights ongoing interest from organizations like IBM.

1. Service-oriented Communities
and Fractal Social Organizations
Models and concepts
for a Smarter Planet
Vincenzo De Florio
PATS / University of Antwerp & iMinds

2. Structure
• PATS/Adaptive-and-dependable systems
• Urgent need: Rethinking organizations
• Conjecture: Three key requirements
• A building block: Service-oriented community
• A model: Fractal social organizations
• Conclusions.
2April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

3. PATS/Adaptive-and-Dependable Systems
• Systems designed
so as to maintain
functional and non-
functional identity
• Elasticity,
resilience,
antifragility
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

4. Structure
• PATS/Adaptive-and-dependable systems
• Urgent need: Rethinking organizations
• Conjecture: Three key requirements
• Building block: Service-oriented communities
• Model: Fractal social organizations
• Conclusions
5April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

5. Times, they are a-changin’…
6
Less resources
Higher peaks
of requests
Higher number
of users…
ICT
Energy product-
ion & distribution
Businesses
Transport of
goods & people
Water treatment
& distribution
Healthcare…
Understanding & rethinking
our organizations is crucial!
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

6. With the meter in the red zone…
• …organizations that
appeared to work fine
reveal their limitations!
 lose too much
 use up too many resources
 do not scale well
 intolerable to changes
 fail to address new aspects
→ Traditional approaches are
reaching structural limits.
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7. An example: healthcare
8
From www.fifthplay.com
• New context reveals the limitations of the
traditional approach
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

8. The healthcare crisis
• Unmanageability is approaching
 How should we rethink healthcare?
• Starting point: Three observations:
 Society at large is not part of the solution 
Too many resources are wasted
 No complex behaviors are expected from the
vast majority of the components
 Organization (mostly hierarchical) is inflexible,
does not scale well, incurs huge costs…
9
 Three key aspects: Society, organization, behaviour
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

9. Structure
• PATS/Adaptive-and-dependable systems
• Urgent need: Rethinking organizations
• Conjecture: Three key requirements
• Building block: Service-oriented communities
• Model: Fractal social organizations
• Conclusions
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10. 1) SOCIETY
11
• A purely technical
solution simply…
does not work!
 Hardin’s
“Tragedy of
the Commons”

11. • Society must be part of the solution
• Society ≡ abundant, mobile “resources” able
to exercise complex action
• Need: engineer ways to tap into the nearly
unlimited sources of “social energy” of
our societies.
12
Three key requirements... 1) SOCIETY
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

12. 26 November 2012 13SITIS 2012
We have met the solution.
And the solution… is US!

13. • Organizational / architectural choices define
the features of our systems
• Classic model: quasi-closed, hierarchical
systems incapable of any complex
interoperability.
Three key requirements...2)ORGANIZATION
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14. • Need: open smart organizations
 Self-optimizing
 Inter-organizational collective strategies
 Mutualistic relationships; collaborative
sharing of data and resources…
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Three key requirements...2)ORGANIZATION

15. • Conjecture: Biologically inspired distributed
organizations will play a key role in the
emergence of collective intelligent responses
 Holarchies and fractal organizations
• “Simultaneously a part & a whole, a container & a
contained, a controller & a controlled” [Sou00]
 Networks of peer-levels (members).
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Three key requirements...2)ORGANIZATION

16. • Behavior: “change w.r.t. surroundings” [RW43]
• Purposeful, reactive, proactive behaviors
• Needs:
1. Resilient behaviors: change aiming at
preserving identity
2. Antifragile behaviors: change that preserves
identity AND learns how to improve
system-environment fit
Three key requirements... 3) BEHAVIOUR
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17. Structure
• PATS/Adaptive-and-dependable systems
• Urgent need: Rethinking organizations
• Conjecture: Three key requirements
• Building block: Service-oriented communities
• Model: Fractal social organizations
• Conclusions
19April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

18. • Social organization built by explicitly
addressing the mentioned aspects
 Taps into “social energy”
 Node of a distributed organization
 Supports complex resilient behaviours.
Service-oriented communities
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19. 21
Service provider
Service
requester
Service registry
Starting point: classical SOA model
Publish Discover
Bind
Service
description
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

20. Reasoning & coordination
22
Member Member
Member w/
service & feature registry
Service
& feature
SoC building block
Publish Publish
Bind
Individual &
social concerns
optimization.
Capabilities
Policies
Availability
Location…
Events
People
Devices
SOCIETY
BEHAVIOUR
ORGANIZATION
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

21. Example:
Mutual Assistance Community
23
ABC Shop
Smart
devices
Informal service
provider
Commercial vender
Doctor
Community
Access
A smart house
Coordination
center
(professional)
OSGI
Gateway
Create
OWL-S
OWL-S service
publication
Service
Request
OWL-S service
publication
OWL-S service
publication
OWL-S
Matcher
OSGI
bundle
OSGI
bundle
OSGI
bundle
More info: [DeB10]
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony

22. • We created a model of the collective behavior
in a “flat” society of roles
• Society = multiset of roles (=integers)
• Example: S =
{0,0, 1,1, 2, 3,3, 4,4} =
2 GPs, 2 nurses, 1 patient, 2 sensors, 2 cars
SoC: Elements of a Model
26 November 2012 25SITIS 2012

23. • Example: Condition c takes place
(for instance, a patient has fallen)
• Consequence:
Intervention of 1 GP and 1 nurse.
Society S gets partitioned into two “blocks”:
L = {0, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4} and R = {0, 1, 2}.
SoC: Elements of a Model
26

24. • Inactive (L, c) ; Active (R, c)
• (L(t), R(t))t≥0 : a dynamic system that tells
how S evolves with time to respond to c’s
• How does the space of all possible L’s and
R’s look like?
SoC: Elements of a Model
27

25. Modularity
28

26. Other properties:
Modularity; Self-similarity
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27. Structure
• PATS/Adaptive-and-dependable systems
• Urgent need: Rethinking organizations
• Conjecture: Three key requirements
• Building block: Service-oriented communities
• Model: Fractal social organizations
• Conclusions
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28. • The SoC model provides us with key ideas
 Modularity; self-similarity; fractal dimension…
• Major result: A hierarchy emerges from the
flat society!
 We injected these ideas back into the model
Fractal Social Organizations
26 November 2012 31SITIS 2012

29. 32
Member Member
Service
description
SoC as a building block
Publish Publish
Bind
Local
Reasoning & coordination
Individual &
social concerns
optimization
Capabilities
Policies
Availability
Location…
Events
People
Devices MemberMember MemberMember
Exception  Event propagation
Member w/
service & feature registry
April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony
SoC’s

30. A fractal organization of SoC’s
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31. • Members publish events, attributes, policies…
• Events trigger analysis, planning, reaction,
and re-organization
• Exceptions propagate events to a higher level
• Concept applicable to various domains
 AAL, crisis management, business organizations,
etc.
Fractal social organizations
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32. iMinds project “LittleSister”
36

33. • We introduced the main ideas of fractal social
organizations
 Three key “principles”: Society, behaviour,
organization
• Much is yet to be done
 From principles to simulation & actual design
 From design to deployment & testing
 Formal models to guarantee resilience...
 Etc etc!
Conclusions
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34. • Much interest about this concept
 IBM! 
 iMinds SuperMinds
 Project proposals for H2020 (Crises
management; AAL)
• Other ideas at
http://eraclios.blogspot.be/
Conclusions
26 November 2012 38SITIS 2012

35. • Contact us through:
vincenzo.deflorio@uantwerpen.be
chris.blondia@uantwerpen.be
Thanks!
Conclusions
39April 2, 2014 IBM Faculty Award Ceremony