The document discusses the urgent need to rethink social organizations, particularly in areas like healthcare, due to traditional models reaching their limits. It proposes the concept of service-oriented communities (SOC) that are fractal in nature, emphasizing collaboration, distributed organization, and adaptive behaviors as key aspects. The conclusions highlight the potential for SOCs to optimize resources by employing diverse capabilities and addressing social concerns.

1. Service-oriented Communities:
Models and Concepts towards
Fractal Social Organizations
Vincenzo De Florio, Antonio Coronato,
Mohamed Bakhouya, Giovanna Di Marzo
PATS / University of Antwerp & iMinds

2. Structure
• Urgent need: Rethinking organizations
• Conjecture: Three key aspects to be
addressed
• A design: Service-oriented communities
• Models
• Conclusions
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3. Times, they are a-changin’…
ICT
Less resources
Businesses
Energy production & distribution
Higher peaks
of requests
Transport of
goods & people
Water treatment
& distribution
Higher number
of users…
Understanding & rethinking
our organizations is crucial!
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Healthcare…
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4. With the meter in the red zone…
• …organizations that appeared to work fine
now reveal limitations
…they use up too many resources
 …they do not scale well
 …they are intolerable to changes
 …they fail to address new aspects

→ Traditional approaches are reaching
structural limits.
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5. An example: healthcare
From www.fifthplay.com
• New context reveals the limitations of the
traditional approach
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6. 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 behaviours are expected from the
vast majority of the components
 Organization (mostly hierarchical) is inflexible,
does not scale well, implies huge costs…
 Three key aspects: Society, organization, behaviour

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7. 1) SOCIETY
Three key aspects...
• A purely technical solution simply does not
work

See e.g. Hardin’s “Tragedy of Commons”
• Society must be part of the solution
• Society  abundant, mobile “resources” able
to exercise complex action

In particular, collaboration.
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8. Three key aspects...
2) ORGANIZATION
• Organizational / architectural choices define
the features of our systems

Centralized, hierarchical, heterarchical,
distributed…
• Distributed: e.g. holarchies & fractal orgs

Biologically inspired
 Members are “simultaneously a part and a whole,
a container and a contained, a controller and a
controlled”
[Sou00]
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9. Three key aspects...
3) BEHAVIOUR
• I.e., “change w.r.t. surroundings” [RWB43]
• Ability to

introspect,
 analyze and locate limiting factors w.r.t.
environmental conditions
 learn how to reconfigure and reshape oneself
so as to match a “dynamically varying set of
environmental conditions”
[DeB10]:
• Complex, collective, adaptive behaviours.
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10. Service-oriented communities
• A social organization built by explicitly
addressing the mentioned aspects
Taps into “social energy”
 Makes use of a distributed organization
 Supports complex adaptive and autonomic
behaviours.

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11. Starting point: classical SOA model
Service registry
Publish
Service provider
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Service
description
Bind
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Discover
Service
requester
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12. SoC building block
ORGANIZATION
BEHAVIOUR
Individual &
social concerns
optimization.
Reasoning & coordination
Member w/
service & feature registry
Capabilities
Policies
Availability
Location…
People
Devices
Publish
Member
Service
& feature
Bind
Publish
Events
Member
SOCIETY
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13. Example:
Mutual Assistance Community
Informal service
provider
Smart
devices
OSGI
ABC Shop
OWL-S service
bundle
publication
OSGI
bundle
OSGI
Gateway
bundle
Access
OWL-S service
publication
Coordination
center
OSGI
Create
OWL-S
Commercial vender
Service
Request
A smart house
OWL-S
Matcher
OWL-S service
publication
Doctor
(professional)
Community
More info: [DeB10]
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14. Mutual Assistance Community
• Organization based on a single SoC building
block

Aim: optimally employing devices & human
beings with diverse capabilities, backgrounds,
and information so as to organize intelligent
responses to AAL-related problems
 Not just safety nets:
• Reducing social isolation of elderly people
• Reducing costs – best utilizing the social resources

Self-serve paradigm (mutually satisfying
requests).
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15. SoC as a fractal social organization
Exception  Event propagation
Individual &
social concerns
optimization
Local
Reasoning & coordination
Member w/
service & feature registry
Capabilities
Policies
Availability
Location…
People
Devices
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Publish
Member
Member
Member
Service
description
Bind
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Publish
Events
Member
Member
Member
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16. SoC as a fractal social organization
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17. SoC as a fractal social organization
L2 Member
L1 Member
Member
Member
L1 Member
Member
Member
L0 Member
Member
Member
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L0 Member
Member
Member
L0 Member
Member
Member
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L0 Member
Member
Member
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18. Service-oriented Community
• 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.
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19. Elements of formal model (1/2)
• Societies as multisets of roles, e.g.
{GP2, nurse2, patient8}
• Situations induce a partitioning, e.g.
L = {GP, nurse, patient7}
R = {GP, nurse, patient}

Left side is inactive, right side is active (dealing
with situation at hand)
 Active part of society = community.
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20. Elements of formal model (2/2)
• Evolution can be modelled as the dynamics of
sets L(t) and R(t):
(L(t),R(t)) t ≥ 0
• A way to represent this dynamics is through
permutations of the society multiset
• This reveals certain properties.
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21. Self-similarity
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22. Elements of operational model
•
•
•
•
Activity: «situation : action»
Action:
( role → step )
E.g.
«fallen : (role-δ1 → alarm(fallen))»
A role-δ1 actor needs to be located

OK: new community
 KO: exception
• n actions  n communities / exceptions
• More information in the paper.
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23. Conclusions
• We introduced the main ideas of SoC, a
fractal social organization based on 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.
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24. References
•
•
•
•
•
•
[RWB43] Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior,
Purpose and Teleology". Philosophy of Science, 10(1943), S. 18–24
[DeB10] V. De Florio, C. Blondia, "Service-oriented Communities: Visions and
Contributions towards Social Organizations", Proc. of MONET 2010, LNCS Vol.
6428/2010
[Ha1968] Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons", Science, Vol. 162 (Dec.
1968)
[Sou00] P. Sousa, N. Silva, T. Heikkila, M. Kallingbaum and P. Valcknears, P.
“Aspects of Co-operation in Distributed Manufacturing Systems”. Studies in
Informatics and Control Journal, 9 (2), 2000
V. De Florio, "The HeartQuake Dynamic System", Complex Systems, Vol. 9, No.
2, April 1995, pp. 91-114. (Complex Systems Publications, Champaign, IL)
V. De Florio, "Permutation Numbers", Complex Systems, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2005
(Complex Systems Publications, Champaign, IL).
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