Towards self-configuration and management of e-service provisioning in dynamic value constellations

Networked value constellations are collections of enterprises that jointly satify complex consumer needs. Increasingly, such needs are satised by e-services, i.e. commercial services that can be ordered and provisioned via the Internet. Current research in dynamic web-service composition has yielded run-time platforms to dynamically compose complex web services, but there is still a considerable gap between web services and commercial e-services. To compose e-services, an estimation of commercial protability must be made, which is absent from web service composition. In this paper, we extend our earlier approach to e-service composition with a dynamic part, that ensures that a commercial e-service can be dynamically composed from other commercial e-services, and can be mapped on a web service composition and process composition of lower-level web services. We propose a skeleton-oriented approach, that first composes a network of enterprises, jointly satisfying need, based on commercial considerations. Second, given a set of such candidate value constellations, the business processes providing the services can be dynamically configured. We illustrate this skeleton-driven composition of networked value constellations by using a case study of clearing and repartitioning of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).