Collaborative Business Services Provision
Luis M. Camarinha-Matos
1
, Hamideh Afsarmanesh
2
, Ana Inês Oliveira
1
and Filipa Ferrada
1
1
UNINOVA, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Campus de Caparica, 2829-516 Monte Caparica, Portugal
2
Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Keywords: Collaborative Networks, Business Services, Service-enhanced Products.
Abstract: The association of services to manufactured products, leading to service-enhanced products, is an important
mechanism for value creation and differentiation. This is particularly relevant in the case of complex, highly
customized and long-life products. Suitable servicing in this context typically requires the collaboration
among multiple stakeholders. Furthermore, the involvement of the customer is not limited to service
consumption but rather includes contributions to new services design and configuration. As such, this paper
contributes to the clarification of concepts and definition of a framework for collaborative business services
design (co-creation) and delivery. Application examples are illustrated for the solar energy sector.
1 INTRODUCTION
Collaboration and co-innovation in business services
open new perspectives of value creation in
manufacturing. The notion of service-enhanced
product (also known as product-service) and the
associated idea of service-enhanced manufacturing
represent a growing trend, particularly in the context
of complex products. The motivation is that buyers
of manufactured products increasingly want more
than the physical product itself, they might want
finance options to buy it, insurance to protect it,
expertise to install it, support to maintain it fully
operational during its life cycle, advice on how to
maximize returns from it, expertise to manage it, etc.
(Shen, 2010). A product-service can be thought of as
a market proposition that extends the traditional
functionality of a product by incorporating
additional business services, especially in global
markets.
Service-enhancement of products is closely
related to product differentiation. In many industries
it is difficult to differentiate manufactured products
and thus the profit margins tend to narrow (Bitner
and Brown, 2006). By associating services that add
value to the products, greater forms of
differentiation can be achieved and new business
opportunities generated. For instance, in the case of
the solar energy plants, which have a long life-cycle,
there are interesting opportunities to introduce new
services and particularly new forms of service
delivery through collaboration. But similar
motivation can be found in many other sectors.
The service sector is traditionally defined as
whatever is not agriculture or manufacturing. During
the last century there has been a large shift of jobs,
first from agriculture to manufacture, and in the last
decades from manufacturing to services. The most
advanced economies are dominated by the services
sector, which accounts to more than 70% of the
GDP (Ostrom et al., 2010). This is clearly the reality
in the case of the USA and most European countries.
But this trend can also be observed in countries that
have been traditionally more oriented to
manufacturing, such as the case of China which is
experiencing a rapid growth of the service sector.
Current discussions around the ongoing
economic crisis might lead to some level of
refocusing on manufacturing and even agriculture,
as reflected in some calls for re-industrialization of
Europe. Certainly one should draw lessons from the
economic downturn and appreciate it as an
opportunity for the emergence of new business
models towards sustainable value creation.
Therefore, the discussion should not be one vs. the
other but rather taking advantage of both -
combining services with manufactured products
(including agribusiness products) to enhance and
add value to those products. This calls for
collaboration and involvement of customers and
local suppliers in target markets. In fact, the notion
of glocal enterprise represents the idea of thinking
and acting globally, while being aware and
380
M. Camarinha-Matos L., Afsarmanesh H., Inês Oliveira A. and Ferrada F..
Collaborative Business Services Provision.
DOI: 10.5220/0004535803800390
In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2013), pages 380-390
ISBN: 978-989-8565-60-0
Copyright
c
 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

responding adequately to local specificities.
One of the characteristics of our economy today
is that enterprises increasingly need to compete
while also collaborate in a global market, using the
Internet and other technical means to overcome the
traditional barrier of geographical distribution.
Internet and cloud computing not only facilitate the
development of new collaborative processes, but
also allow for new ways of (remotely) delivering
services associated to products.
Another characteristic is the continuous and
rapid change and innovation, which may be internal
or external to individual enterprises (open
innovation and co-innovation), but anyway
affecting how these enterprises can perform in
relation to other enterprises and their market
environment (Romero and Molina, 2011). The
success of an enterprise, therefore, more and more
depends on its ability to seamlessly interoperate with
other agile enterprises, and be able to adapt to actual
or imminent changes and adjust to local specificities,
next to other core competence in making some
product or providing a service in the most efficient
and sustainable way.
In terms of research on services and service-
orientation, earlier periods were characterized by
intense but separate activity in different
communities, such as the wave of works on services
marketing in the 1970s and 1980s, promoted by the
business schools, or the more recent overwhelming
developments in the ICT sector around the web
services technologies. Nowadays there is a growing
consensus on the need to adopt a multi-disciplinary
perspective, as advocated by the efforts to establish
services science as a new scientific field
(Chesbrough and Spohrer, 2006).
In this context, this paper aims at contributing to
the clarification of concepts associated to service-
enhanced products and their technological support,
with particular emphasis on composite services
collaboratively provided by various stakeholders.
2 GLONET PROJECT
GloNet is a European collaborative project, funded
under the ICT-Factories of the Future program,
which aims at designing, developing, and deploying
an agile virtual enterprise environment for networks
of SMEs involved in highly customized and service-
enhanced products through end-to-end collaboration
with customers and local suppliers (co-creation)
(Camarinha-Matos et al., 2011). The notion of
glocal enterprise is adopted in GloNet through value
creation from global networked operations and
involving global supply chain management, product-
service linkage, and management of distributed
production units.
Further to service-based enhancement, GloNet
also considers the growing trend in manufacturing to
move towards highly customized products,
ultimately one-of-a-kind, which is reflected in the
term mass customization. In fact, mass
customization refers to a customer co-design process
of products and services which meet the
needs/choices of each individual customer with
regard to the variety of different product features.
Important challenges in such manufacturing contexts
can be elicited from the requirements of complex
technical infrastructures, solar energy parks,
intelligent buildings, etc.
The guiding use case in GloNet is the life cycle
support of photovoltaic solar energy parks. The
norm of operation in this industry is that of one-of-a-
kind production. The involved systems and services
are typically delivered through complementary
competences shared between different project
participants. A particularly important challenge here
is the design and delivery of multi-stakeholder
complex services along the product life cycle, which
typically spans over 20 years.
Focused issues in this context include: (i)
Information / knowledge representation (product
catalogue, processes descriptions, best practices,
company profiles, brochures, etc.); (ii) User-
customized interfaces, dynamically adjusted to assist
different stakeholders (smart enterprise approach);
(iii) Services provision through cloud; (iv) Broker-
customer interaction support: from order to
(product/service) design (open innovation
approach); (v) Negotiation support; (vi) Workflow
for negotiated order solution & its monitoring; and
(vii) Risks management support.
In addition to the mentioned use case, and in
order to achieve further generalization and thus
increase the application potential of the proposed
solutions, GloNet requirements are also checked
against the needs of other relevant use cases with
similar abstract characteristics. As such, and taking
into account the competencies and interests of the
industrial partners in the consortium, the following
additional use cases are analysed: Intelligent
buildings use case; and Physical incubator facilities
use case.
The project started in Sep 2011 with a planned
duration of 3 years, and involves the following
partners: CAS (Germany), UNINOVA (Portugal),
University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), iPLON
CollaborativeBusinessServicesProvision
381

(Germany), SKILL (Spain), Steinbeis (Germany),
KOMIX (Czech Republic), and PROLON
(Denmark).
3 BUSINESS SERVICES
In spite of recent efforts, as represented by the
Services Science movement (Chesbrough and
Spohrer, 2006; Bitner and Brown, 2006; Spohrer and
Maglio, 2009), the notion of service remains
ambiguous. Two main literature streams -
management and computer science - among others,
have proposed a number of definitions that often
represent a partial perspective of the concept. The
ICT developments tend to consider services as some
form of "black boxes" that perform some action,
being more focused on data, control flow, and
interoperability aspects. Other streams look at
services from a business perspective, tending to see
a service in terms of the added value that is
delivered to a customer and the conditions of
delivery. Under this perspective, issues such as
quality of service (QoS), service level agreement
(SLA), terms and conditions, period of availability,
interactions with customer, etc., become the focus of
attention.
A few recent works have tried to bridge the gap
between these two notions of service (Ferrario and
Guarino, 2009; Cardoso and Camarinha-Matos,
2011). Similarly, an ongoing initiative to establish a
Unified Service Description Language (USDL)
(Oberle et al., 2013) makes an attempt to merge
various perspectives of service. Although clearly in
line with the “ICT school”, namely regarding the
developments in Service-Oriented Architectures,
Web Services and Semantic Web Services, USDL
tries to also embed aspects of business services,
service networks and service provision systems.
In our opinion, it makes sense to separate two
concepts - business service and software or technical
service. Although they can be interrelated, as
discussed below, they basically correspond to
different views or perspectives that need to be
clarified. In GloNet we are particularly interested in
business services that add value to the physical
product, i.e. that add value to the power plant during
its operation (along its 20-year life cycle). Table 1
illustrates typical business services in the operation
and maintenance of solar power plants.
Because a business service typically involves
some flows of activities and interactions with the
customer, often the terms of business service and
business process appear (confusingly) intermixed,
although they correspond to different concepts.
What is a business service? An earlier
definition by Ted Hill (1977) states: “A (business)
service is a change in the condition of a person, or a
good belonging to some economic entity, brought
about as the result of the activity of some other
economic entity, with the approval of the first person
or economic entity”. Also according to Hill,
(business) services and goods (or physical products)
are of different ontological categories: while goods
are both transactable and transferable, services are
transactable, but not transferable. A number of
characteristics can be further identified to
distinguish between (business) services and
(physical) products (Engelmann, 2008; Chesbrough
and Spohrer, 2006; Sanz et al., 2007):
‐ Services are intangible;
‐ Services are interactive, with a high level of
customer interaction during the process of
service production, delivery and consumption;
‐ Simultaneity of production (execution) and
consumption;
‐ Services are bound to a particular time (when
they are available and delivered) and place
(where they are delivered).
It is important to distinguish between service
providing, service availability and service delivery.
Service providing is about the introduction of a
service by its provider within the community of its
potential customers. This happens for instance
through advertising a service in the market, or in the
case of the GloNet environment, through the
introduction/registration of the service within the
collaborative enterprise network. About the service
availability and delivery, consider that a customer
may keep paying for a corrective maintenance
service (thus guaranteeing the availability of the
service), while the service might never be delivered
if no malfunctioning is ever detected.
Another definition of business service (Ferrario
and Guarino, 2009) puts the focus on the notions of
availability and delivery of the service: “A (business)
service is present at a time T and location L iff, at
time T, an agent is explicitly committed to guarantee
the execution of some type of action at location L, on
the occurrence of a certain triggering event, in the
interest of another agent and upon prior agreement,
in a certain way". This definition brings about a
number of interesting aspects:
 Then notion of commitment through which an
entity guarantees the execution of some kind of
action(s) in the interest of the customer. This
notion comes in line with another definition by
O’Sullivan (2006): “A service instance is
ICEIS2013-15thInternationalConferenceonEnterpriseInformationSystems
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essentially a promise by one party (the provider)
to perform a function on behalf of another party
at some time and place and through some
channel”.
 Commitment and availability are different
notions. For instance, in the case of
malfunctioning periods (of the service provision
system) or working pauses, the commitment still
holds but the service is not available
(temporarily). Specific constraints regarding
availability can be defined in the agreement
(service level agreement) or contract.
 The commitment by an agent to guarantee a
service does not necessarily imply that the
service is performed by this agent; it can be
delegated on other entities, although the
responsibility toward the customer remains with
the agent that made the “promise”.
 A service delivery implies a delivery location
where the actions take place or the added value is
provided. In the case of the solar plants, the
effects of several services take place at the actual
location of the power plant, although they might
be performed remotely (through an ICT
channel).
 The actual delivery of the service, i.e. the
execution of the associated action(s), is initiated
by a triggering event. For instance, in the case of
a reactive maintenance service, the triggering
event can be the detection of a malfunctioning
alarm. In case of a preventive maintenance
service, the triggering event can be the scheduled
time for the periodic maintenance.
 The expression “execution of some type of action
… in a certain way" implies a process. When the
service is quite standardized, its execution may
well be represented by a business process. In
some cases, the service might be performed
through alternative business processes,
depending on the triggering event (Figure 1).
Business
service
Business
processes
realizes
Externalview
(customer)
what
how
Internalview
triggera
triggerb
Actor1
Actor2
Actor1
Actor2
Figure 1: Views of business service.
In this sense, we can see the notion of business
service as an abstract construct that basically
encapsulates the external or customer’s view. This
“construct” specifies what (value) and under what
conditions it would be delivered.
Internal to some “service performance system” we
can see the service as materialized by some business
sub-processes. In other words, the business
(sub)processes (and associated triggering events)
represent how the service is performed (its
interaction behavioral part).
In the case of less structured services in which the
actual set of actions to be performed and their flow
strongly depend on the interactions with the
customer (during service delivery), it might be
difficult to model the interaction behavior of the
service through well-defined processes in advance,
and thus the processes are dynamically configured
“on the fly” during the execution. In this case it is
probably more adequate to specify the interaction
behavior in terms of a set of rules.
The performance of the actions involved in the
business service delivery can be done automatically
or manually. The automatic solutions can be
materialized through the invocation of some
software services. Manual tasks are human-executed
activities ("human tasks").
Service delivery is subject to a number of
conditions agreed between the provider and the
customer which are typically formalized in a
contract / agreement and govern the responsibilities
of all involved parties.
Since a provider might offer more than one
service, it might be convenient to introduce the
concept of service entity – an encapsulation of the
various services provided by the same entity; in
other words, a representation of a service provider
(Franco et al., 2009; Cardoso and Camarinha-Matos,
2011).
Service Design. In traditional manufacturing,
design has been mainly concerned with the physical
product itself, not with services. Given the growing
importance of the service sector, a new stream of
research emerged mainly in the last decade to
provide effective approaches and tools for service
design. Given the strong interactions between
customer and service providers, service design
focuses primarily on: (i) identifying user interactions
or “touchpoints”; (ii) designing interfaces and
methods to capture the perceived customer
experiences; and (iii) service provision management.
CollaborativeBusinessServicesProvision
383

Table 1: Examples of business services in the Photovoltaic Plants Operations and Maintenance area.
Service
Category
Business Service Brief description
Typical
frequency
Form of
provision
Operation
monitoring
Collecting and
processing real-
time data on the
plant, combined
with control
operation
Energy monitoring
services
Based on real-time data, allowing to know the energy production in
real time, to compare it with expectations, find any issues with
equipment, and predict the power generated with increased
certainty.
Continuous Mostly automated
Monitoring reports
Generating a set of relevant reports required for different
stakeholders (owner, utility company, insurance company, financial
institution, etc.)
Monthly Mostly automated
System performance
testing
To understand plant performance, what drives it, and provide
performance testing, benchmarks, power quality analysis, etc.
Mostly automated
Site security services
To detect and to some extent prevent intruders and potential
vandalism actions.
Continuous Automated and/or
manual
Data analytics
services
Specialized services to analyse historic data (through data mining)
and find methods for enhanced diagnostics, troubleshooting and
operation.
As needed Mostly automated
Preventive
Maintenance
Routine inspection
and servicing of
equipment and
plant site to
prevent
breakdowns and
production losses
Panel Cleaning
It affects panel’s performance. However it highly depends on site
conditions – amount of dust, pollen and pollution, frequency of rain
and snow, etc.
1-2x Times/Year
(depends on local
conditions)
Mostly manual, with
some automatic
checks
Vegetation
Management
Less critical than panel cleaning, it involves cutting grass, bushes,
etc., as they might also affect the operation of the equipment,
depending on local conditions such as the amount of rain.
1-3 Times/Year
(depends on local
conditions)
Mostly manual, with
some automatic
checks
Wildlife Prevention
The development of colonies of wildlife (rats, rabbits, bird nests,
etc.) might destroy some equipment. Preventive actions depend on
local conditions.
Variable
(depends on local
conditions)
Mostly manual
Water Drainage
To ensure proper drainage of water that results from raining or
snow melting. It depends on local meteorological conditions and
land structure.
Variable
(depends on local
conditions)
Mostly manual
Retro-Commissioning
A process for identifying less-than-optimal performance in the
f
acility’s equipment, and control systems and making the necessary
adjustments (replace outdated equipment, or improve efficiency).
1 Time/Year Mostly manual, with
some automatic
checks
Upkeep of Data
Acquisition and
Monitoring Systems
Maintenance of the sensor network / data collection and
communication subsystem.
Undetermined Mostly manual, with
some automatic
checks
Upkeep of Power
Generation System
Periodic maintenance and provision of proofs of any measures
taken are needed periodically, not only to ensure proper operation,
but also to comply with regulations and requirements from the
utility company. It involves e.g., Inverter Servicing, BOS Inspection,
Tracker Maintenance.
1-2x Times/Year Mostly manual, with
some automatic
checks
Corrective /
Reactive
Maintenance
In response to
equipment
breakdown to
mitigate
unplanned
downtime
On-Site Monitoring /
Mitigation
Implementation of on-site mitigation measures in response to
detected weaknesses (e.g. regarding safety and security standards,
unforeseen working conditions)
Variable Mostly manual,
combined with
automatic tests
Critical Reactive
Repair
When a fault / equipment breakdown is detected in a critical
component (e.g. inverter, AC sub-systems).
As Needed (High
Priority)
Mostly manual,
combined with
automatic tests
Non-Critical Reactive
Repair
When a fault / equipment breakdown is detected in a no-critical
component (e.g. weather related sensor).
As Needed Mostly manual,
combined with
automatic tests
Warranty
Enforcement
Since different components have different warranty coverage
conditions, with different penalties associated to the levels of
criticality, it is important to properly manage them in association to
breakdowns.
As Needed Mix automatic -
manual
Condition-
Based
Maintenance
Prioritize and
optimize
maintenance and
resources based
on real-time data
f
or increased
efficiency
Active Monitoring
- Remote and On-Site
Options
Monitoring service allowing to shifts the maintenance process from
'preventive' to 'predictive' model. It involves continuous monitoring
and diagnosis of the equipment health / condition, to ensure zero
downtime due to equipment failures.
Continuous Mostly automatic,
with option. manual
Warranty
Enforcement
Management of warranty contracts enforcement based on collected
real-time data.
As Needed Mostly automatic,
with option. manual
Equipment
Replacement
Different equipment and components have different life-cycles,
requiring replacement along the (long) life cycle of the PV plant.
As Needed Mostly manual, with
some automatic
checks
Other
Support
Additional
services
Training services
Average industrial technicians are familiar with AC, but often less
acquainted with DC power and other specificities of PV plants. Also
personnel involved in other services, e.g. panel cleaning, vegetation
management, need to be trained on safety protocols. Thus, several
levels of training services are foreseen.
As needed In classroom or
remotely via e-
learning
Energy audit services
Establish pattern of energy use and production; identify losses; and
suggest appropriate economically viable engineering solutions to
enhance energy efficiency.
As needed Mix automatic -
manual
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384

4 COLLABORATIVE SERVICE
PROVISION
Business services can be combined together. A
composite business service is a collection of related
and (to some extent) integrated business services
that provide a specific business solution. A lesser
definition may consider it as a grouping of related,
simpler business services.
Figure 2 illustrates one example of a composite
business service. In the case of the solar power
plants, a customer might be interested in an
integrated site maintenance service which is, in fact,
a grouping or composition of various simpler
services - site security service, wildlife prevention
service, vegetation management service, and water
drainage service.
Sitesecurity
service
Wildlife
prevention
Water
drainage
Vegetation
management
Sitemaintenanceservice
(Integrated/compositeservice)
Securitycompany
Serviceintegrator
Wildlifeprevention
company
Sitecleaningcompany
Figure 2: Example of composite, multi-stakeholder
service.
The various simpler services that compose an
integrated service might be provided by different
companies, as also illustrated in Figure 2.
Besides the stakeholders directly involved in the
provision of the simpler services, this example also
shows the role of a new stakeholder - the service
integrator - that coordinates the other ones and
possibly offers a unique contact point to the
customer. The customer would typically establish a
single contract with the service integrator and not
separate contracts with the other providers.
This group of entities together forms a virtual
organization (VO) for the provision of this
composite service, where the service integrator plays
the role of virtual organization coordinator. This
organizational structure and the role of business
service integrator open new business opportunities
for SMEs.
In the case of PV energy sector, although a few
large companies are able to offer a large number of
the services shown in Table 1 (EPRI, 2010), most
SMEs active in this domain are focused on the
provision of just a small subset. This situation limits
their capabilities, namely their participation in other
geographical markets. Also from the customer
perspective, the resulting fragmentation of services
is not a desirable situation. A single contract / single
interface for a package of services would be
preferable.
However, it is also necessary to avoid typical
problems with extensive sub-contracting /
outsourcing practices. Some large corporations have
extensively outsourced the provision of their
services. However, there is no real collaboration
among the involved sub-contracted entities, and
whenever there is a need that spans across two or
more areas the lack of seamless integration becomes
obvious. The customer then clearly notices the
“walls” between providers and a situation where
there is no clear responsibility, with each one
transferring the responsibilities to the others.
Furthermore, the lack of proper platforms often
leads to problems of synchronization among the
various providers, which again reflects in a bad
quality of the service provided to the customer.
To avoid such risks, rather than a sub-contracting
model, it is necessary to implement a real
collaborative network, supported by an environment
such as GloNet. Further to the need of mere
workflow coordination, typically performed by the
service integrator, it is necessary to have a
collaboration space where the various entities can
share information and resources, and thus
contributing to the building of a sense of co-
responsibility. Complementarily, proper
involvement of local suppliers, close to the customer
location, can increase the sense of proximity.
Often the customer is a co-creator of its needed
services, closely involved in defining, shaping, and
packaging the service. It is important to notice that
in the case of products with a long life cycle, these
interactions are built around long-term relationships.
Furthermore, although ICT facilitates remote
delivery of some services or service components,
other parts require local intervention.
For instance, in the case of the PV energy plants,
a service like “Energy production monitoring” can
be delivered remotely. Through a network of sensors
and data loggers installed in the plant and some
communication channels, it is possible to collect
real-time data on Internet (a kind of Internet of
Things). However, a service like “Water drainage”
will require local (manual) intervention. Other
services might combine remote and local operation.
For instance, a “Panel cleaning” service might
involve some remote actions (e.g. detection of a
CollaborativeBusinessServicesProvision
385

production performance level lower than expected),
a local (manual) activity (the actual cleaning) and
possibly another remote action to verify the end
result.
In order to give the customer a feeling of
proximity, and thus a better service experience, it is
important to involve local suppliers in some
components of the service delivery. The services
science community uses the term service experience
“to encompass all aspects of the production,
delivery, and creation of value from the customer’s
perspective” (Ostrom et al., 2010).
To address the questions above and improve
collaboration and proximity, GloNet contributes
with a number of elements:
 Mix of collaborative networks. GloNet assumes
two base communities out of which members
will be selected to compose the VO in charge of
the service provisioning: The long-term
manufacturers’ network and the informal
community of local stakeholders around the
customer (Figure 3). The service integrator will
typically be selected from the manufacturers’
network.
Customer‐related
“community”
Manufacturers
network
Product
servicingVO
“Recruitmentspace”for
theproductservicingVO
customer
Figure 3: Recruitment of members for the product
servicing VO.
 Co-creation business scenario. One of the
relevant business scenarios identified in GloNet
is aimed at providing an environment that
supports and promotes the collaborative design
of new business services. It foresees a
collaboration environment that helps providing
business services based on innovation,
knowledge and customer orientation, as well as
identifying future needs, through collaboration
between manufacturers and the customer and
members of the customer’s community (open
innovation approach). Figure 4 shows the i*
Strategic Rational model for this scenario.
D
D
D
H
e
l
p
Figure 4: Strategic Rationale i* Model for Co-creation.
 Collaboration spaces. The notion of
“collaboration space”, introduces a sharing space
where effective collaboration among the multiple
stakeholders involved in the service creation and
provision can take place (details in section 6).
Clearly the approach adopted in GloNet does not
follow the traditional company-centric CRM model,
but rather a collaborative network/ecosystem model,
which is more promising in terms of sustainability
and better contributes to the quality of service (in
comparison with outsourcing), namely in what
concerns the responsibility each entity has within the
service that is provided to the customer as a whole.
Naturally technology is not enough to achieve an
effective collaborative approach to business
services; a new culture is needed. This requires other
tools such as: Better communication strategy; Team
building; Training; Etc.; which are not in the core of
a technology-oriented project such as GloNet. But
technology is an enabler, facilitating sharing,
visibility and transparency among the involved
stakeholders.
5 SERVICE PACKAGING
Customers are often interested in a grouping of
services, rather than an isolated service. Typically a
bundle or package of services is offered for a more
competitive price. Two approaches can be
considered for this grouping:
 Free grouping. In this case the customer freely
selects, from the portfolio of available services,
the ones he wants to subscribe. The specific
delivery conditions, service level agreement, etc.,
are negotiated on a case by case basis.
Sometimes there are dependencies between
services and then the selection of one specific
service might mandatorily imply the selection of
another one from which this service depends on.
For instance, in the solar energy case, the
subscription of the service "Monitoring reports"
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will probably require the service "Energy
monitoring" as well, as the latter case provides
the base sensorial network that is needed for real-
time data acquisition.
Table 4: Illustrative example of pre-prepared business
service packages in the solar energy case.
Service
Category
Business Service
Basic Comfort Premiu
m
Operation
monitoring
Energy monitoring services
X X X
Monitoring reports
X X X
System performance testing
X X
Site security services
X
Data analytics services
X X
Preventive
Maintenance
Panel Cleaning
X X
Vegetation Management
X
Wildlife Prevention
Water Drainage
Retro-Commissioning
Upkeep of Data Acquisition
and Monitoring Systems
X X X
Upkeep of Power Generation
System
X X X
Corrective /
Reactive
Maintenance
On-Site Monitoring /
Mitigation
X X
Critical Reactive Repair
X X
Non-Critical Reactive Repair
X
Warranty Enforcement
X
Condition-
Based
Maintenance
Active Monitoring
- Remote and On-Site
Options
X
Warranty Enforcement
(Planned and Unplanned)
X
Equipment Replacement
(Planned and Unplanned)
X
Other
Support
Training services
Energy audit services
 Pre-packaged Options. Under this approach, the
service provider (service integrator) organizes
some pre-configured packages of services, which
already take into account all interdependencies
and are offered under pre-defined conditions.
Often these packages correspond to different
levels of coverage, e.g. basic, comfort, and
premium. Table 4 shows an example of packages
in the solar energy case. Additional services, not
included in a specific package level, would have
to be negotiated with the service provider.
6 IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES
Taking into account the characteristics mentioned
above, Figure 5 introduces the proposed model for
business services. The UML diagram also represents
the iterative definition of composed business
services, through their individual or atomic services.
Table 5 gives a brief description of the elements
of the business services that constitute their profiles.
Figure 6 shows a simplified diagram of the
GloNet system architecture, which follows a SOA
approach (MacKenzie et al., 2006) and is developed
using standard blocks of a Java based technology
stack, Eclipse, MySQL, Apache Tomcat, etc. The
base platform, developed by CAS Software AG,
uses an OSGi run-time based on the Spring
framework. The system runs on top of a cloud-based
IaaS.
Figure 5: Simplified business service model in UML.
CollaborativeBusinessServicesProvision
387

Table 5: Brief description of the elements of business
service profiles.
Element Description
Business
Service
The core element in this diagram for the
definition of business service profile. If the
BS is composed, then its individual BSs are
also properly defined. Also the 1..* depends-
on relationship which is defined for business
services, models the potential inter-relation
between one business service and a set of
other services, e.g. a dependency may exist
between an Energy management business
service and certain other specific Lighting
and heating management business services,
due to the specific input that needs to be
exchanged among them.
BS Id A unique number which identifies the
business service (BS) in the registry.
BS Name The name of the BS.
Execution
duration
The duration of time to execute the BS.
Price range The min and max price for the BS that
should be paid by the customer.
Certification Documents certifying the quality of the BS,
according a particular set of standards.
Notes Provides some essential recommendations or
advises about deploying the business service.
Provider
The company that provide the BS.
Customer
Past and present customers of the BS.
Composed
BS
The kind of business services which consists
of several individual business services.
Atomic BS
A single business service (a service which is
not registered as a composed BS).
Business
Process
A process description for the business
service, represented by a BPMN Diagram.
Trigger
Event
Events that launch the execution of business
processes implementing the business service.
Service
integrator
The entity that offers an integrated or
composed business service, coordinates the
other involved providers, and possibly offers
a unique contact point to the customer.
Contextual
Descriptions
Contextual information about the business
services.
Goal
Addresses the technical or strategic goals of
the business service.
Strategic
Goal
Specifies the business targets and benefits of
the business service.
Technical
Goal
Specifies the operational targets of the
business service, which aim at satisfying
strategic goals of the business service.
Context
Describes the business or industrial context
of the business service.
Capabilities
Addresses the capabilities and capacities of
the business service.
Contract
Establishes an agreement between a supplier
and a customer, for the provision of one or
more business services.
SL Delivery
Conditions
Describes the specific conditions during the
business service delivery. This element
includes facets such pre-conditions, post-
conditions, privacy policy, etc.
SLA
Specifies the service level agreement
associated to the contracted service(s)
provision.
Long‐Ter m
StrategicNetworks
Management
Goal‐OrientedNetworks
(VirtualOrganizations)
Management
Service‐EnhancedProductSupport
PlatformBasicComponents
PlatformServicesSupport
StakeholdersSpaceInterface
Figure 6: Main blocks of the GloNet system architecture.
7 COLLABORATION SPACES
GloNet adopts the notion of collaboration space as a
construct to facilitate the interaction among
stakeholders involved in the achievement of some
common goal. Nowadays this notion is used in both
the physical and virtual worlds. In the physical
world, besides the traditional characteristics of a
meeting room, it means an environment that
supports a group of people in working
collaboratively, such as doing brainstorming or
performing some tasks. It can involve novel design
ideas and furniture to inspire creative thinking and
provide different sensations according to the
objectives of the collaborative activity. In the virtual
world we try to mimic some of these aspects
allowing a group of geographically disperse
participants to work together, mediated by
technology. In terms of the virtual collaboration
spaces, various other terms are often found in the
literature to represent similar notions. Examples
include virtual room and virtual co-working space.
There are also hybrid versions, which combine
physical spaces with advanced technologies to allow
both local and remote participation.
GloNet is particularly concerned with the virtual
world version in order to support the members of a
collaborative network, mostly composed of SMEs.
Two main collaboration spaces were initially
identified: Collaborative solution space and Services
provision space. In terms of basic characteristics, the
two spaces are quite similar, but their purpose and
thus the support tools are distinct.
Collaborative Solution Space. This case is
envisaged to support a group of stakeholders in the
design and development of a new solution, e.g.
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initial design and development of the product, or co-
creation of a new business service. Table 6 shows its
main characteristics.
Table 6: Characteristics of the collaborative solution
space.
M
eeting place A specific user interface provides a common
web access point to the participants.
- Purpose Joint development of a product or business
service.
- Participant
group
The members of the VO involved in the
development of a specific solution. For
instance, it can be the “product development
network” (the VO involved in the development
of the physical product and design of initial
associated business services), or the “service
co-creation network” (the dynamic (temporary)
VO involved in the design and development of
new business services associated to the
(physical) product.
Sharing space A specific information sharing space to allow
sharing specific information and knowledge
assets that the participants decide to bring in, as
well as those assets (e.g. product model,
business process models) that they jointly
create.
Support tools Besides generic collaboration tools, the various
functionalities provided in the GloNet system
for Product Configuration, Service-Enhanced
Product Ordering, Service Registering, etc.,
will be accessible through the user interface.
P
rivacy and
security
The generic protection mechanisms of the
platform are used to guarantee protection and
access rights to the VO participants. Depending
on the access rights of each participant, they
might have access to other assets besides the
ones included in the shared space.
Occupancy
period
The “life” of this space is typically tied to the
life cycle of the VO that uses it. Since the aim
is to support the creation of a new product or
service, the space is created by the starter of the
corresponding VO and destroyed when the VO
dissolves. Naturally, the objects created by the
VO and that need to be kept will be maintained
in other information spaces (e.g. product
portfolio, or the private spaces of each tenant),
depending on the specific asset.
One special instance of this collaboration space
corresponds to the business service co-creation
scenario. Creation of a new business service can be
typically done through a co-creation process carried
out by a temporary consortium involving a number
of participants selected from the Manufacturers
network and Customer “network” or Product
Servicing network.
Business Services Provision Space. This class of
collaboration spaces is typically aimed at supporting
the virtual organizations that will provide services to
enhance the product during its life cycle. Table 7
shows its main characteristics.
Table 7: Characteristics of the services provision space.
M
eeting
place
A specific user interface provides a common web
access point to the participants.
- Purpose To support collaboration during the delivery of
(multi-stakeholder) business services along the
life cycle of the product.
-Participant
group
The members of the VO involved in the delivery
of business services associated to a product.
Typically a long-term VO organized to provide
integrated (multi-stakeholder) business services
along the product life-cycle.
Sharing
space
A specific information sharing space is created to
allow sharing specific information and
knowledge assets that the participants decide to
bring in (related to the service provision), and
specially the product model, registry of services,
and all data related to the business services
provision.
Support
tools
Besides generic collaboration tools, various
functionalities provided in the GloNet system for
Product Portfolio Support, Service Monitoring,
etc., will be accessible through the user interface.
P
rivacy and
security
The generic protection mechanisms of the
platform are used to guarantee protection and
access rights to the VO participants. Depending
on the access rights, each participant might have
access to other assets besides the ones in the
shared space.
Occupancy
period
This collaboration space is supposed to be
available during the operation phase of the life
cycle of the product, typically a long duration. It
will typically be connected to the duration of the
services provision contract. Similar to other
collaboration spaces, this one is also created in
association to the VO that uses it, i.e. the
“product servicing network”.
In terms of the GloNet system, these spaces are
accessible through the Stakeholders Space Interface
layer (Figure 6). These spaces are naturally
supported by the collaborative networks
management functionalities. Other important
elements include common ontologies, an essential
element to facilitate collaboration (Afsarmanesh and
Ermilova, 2010; Unal and Afsarmanesh, 2009), and
management of common knowledge and information
assets.
To assess the validity of the proposed solution, a
demonstrator is being built around the use case of
solar energy parks. A solar park represents a clear
example of a complex and highly customized
product, which is expected to have a long life cycle
of around 20~25 years. During its operation phase,
the power plant needs to be supported by a number
of business services. In the case of our demonstrator
these services are provided by a network of
stakeholders located in different continents (Europe
and India), which requires bot a collaboration
platform and proper organizational structures.
Additional validation, but at a smaller scale, is done
CollaborativeBusinessServicesProvision
389

for the case of intelligent buildings.
8 CONCLUSIONS
The development and provision of business services
to enhance products is an important business
opportunity for SMEs in various economic sectors.
Of special relevance is the possibility of developing
composite business services that involve the
collaboration of a network of stakeholders and
provide integrated solutions to the customer.
In this line, the GloNet project addresses the
development of a cloud-based environment aimed at
supporting collaborative business services design
and delivery to enhance complex and highly
customized products. These processes involve the
interplay of various strategic and goal-oriented
collaborative networks.
Proposed models and tools are validated in the
solar energy plants and intelligent buildings sectors.
For this purpose, a large scale demonstrator is being
implemented.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was funded in part by the European
Commission through the GloNet project (FP7
programme). The authors also thank the
contributions from their partners in these projects.
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