From SOA to VOA: A Shift in Understanding the Operation and Evolution of Service Ecosystem

With the development of ICT (information and communications technology) and service economy, service ecosystem is emerging in a lot of fields, including E-commerce, O2O(Online To Offline) life service, healthcare service, cloud manufacturing, and so on. As a complex socio-technical system, the evolution of service ecosystem is the joint result of the interaction of the three heterogeneous networks, including social network, service network and value network. Under such circumstances, the traditional SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)-based analysis model is powerless. As a result, how to analyze the laws behind the evolution of service ecosystem is still a serious challenge in the field. This paper proposes a value oriented analysis framework (VOA) of service ecosystem, which can use value as a clue to describe the interaction of the three heterogeneous networks. In addition, a computational experiment system is established to verify the effectiveness of the VOA framework, which stimulates the effect of different intervention strategies on service ecosystem. The result shows that our analysis framework can provide new means and ideas for the analysis of service ecosystem.

Automated summary

With the advancement of ICT and service economy, service ecosystem has emerged in various fields. The evolution of service ecosystem is influenced by the interaction of three heterogeneous networks - social network, service network, and value network. Traditional analysis models based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are inadequate in this scenario, making the analysis of service ecosystem a challenging task. This paper introduces a value oriented analysis framework (VOA) that utilizes value as a key factor in describing the interaction between the three networks. Additionally, a computational experiment system is developed to test the effectiveness of the VOA framework and explore the impact of different intervention strategies. The results demonstrate that the proposed analysis framework provides new methods and ideas for analyzing service ecosystems.