A reference model of virtual service production networks

Virtual organisation of collaborative networks frequently demands for information and communication technology to support coordination of cross-organisational business process chains. Service-oriented software technologies provide promising means to regulate and enforce coordination of cross-organisational software service interactions but miss organisational abstractions and methodology. This paper proposes a conceptual reference model of collaborative network coordination that satisfies flexibility and agility requirements of virtual organisation by building on common software service abstractions and lifecycle methodology. In particular, the model focuses collaborative service networks and introduces the concept of virtual business service that represents business service processes as software service abstractions and supports flexible regulation and agile enforcement of their coordination by means of software service lifecycle methodology. For demonstration and evaluation purpose, we present a case study of service-oriented systems analysis for virtual organisation of a collaborative e-science network that adopts our conceptual reference model.