Presentation written by V. De Florio and presented by the author at the SITIS 2012 Conference on 2012-11-26

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
SITIS 2012
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
SITIS 2012
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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