ACSI Project Overview

Interoperation between electronic services is one of the most challenging and pressing issues in today’s increasingly globalized and de-centralized economy. The ACSI project tackles this challenge with a unified research program based on two key notions: interoperation hubs and dynamic artifacts. Interoperation hubs enable flexible, scalable support for service collaborations in an open network. Dynamic artifacts provide an approach to modeling and deploying business processes to simplify the management of data and interaction between different services and organizations.

The research has three streams:

• Scientific - Develop the new notion of an artifact-centric interoperation hub,and a surrounding framework of service coordination, views, evolution, verification, and process mining based on formal and empirical techniques and tools
• Technology - Develop a substantial prototype for creating and operating these hubs, that integrates the techniques and tools devised by the scientific research stream
• Validation - Demonstrate and test the results of the research.

The ACSI project aims to achieve dramatic savings over conventional approaches to service interoperation as follows:

1. At least 40% reduction in the design and deployment of environments that support large numbers of service collaborations with similar goals
2. At least 20% reduction in the costs of on-boarding into, and maintaining, service collaborations
3. At least 30% reduction in on-going manual activity needed to support typical service collaborations
4. At least 90% of data transformation in service collaborations will be automated

The ACSI consortium brings together world-class researchers in all of the key technical areas needed for this research, including experts on artifact-centric business processes, verification, data integration and ontologies, process mining, services architectures, and business process management.

ACSI partners

• IBM Research - Haifa (coordinator)
• Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza
• Libera Università di Bolzano
• Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
• Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
• University of Tartu
• Indra Software Labs SLU
• Collibra NV