Coordination and Control in Computational Ecosystems: A Vision of the Future

In computational ecosystems the focus is on creating and maintaining value-adding chains of e-services. The e-services are created, maintained and used by actors with a common interest in an ecosystem. Ecosystems can be seen as hubs supporting, for instance, financial services, distributed health-care or smart homes. We argue that coordination and control in an ecosystem have to support trust among participating parties. This means, among other things, that the architecture and infrastructure of the ecosystem have to incorporate societal support to meet requirements such as trust creation and maintenance. More precisely, we advocate that basic societal concepts to support are Ownership, Responsibility, and Accessibility (ORA). The paper gives an introduction to the concept of ecosystems. We also provide an example of a potential e-service in the form of a comfort management system (COMFY) in a smart home. The paper also includes an layered ORA architecture built on top of SUNs Jini platform.