A Novel Multi-layer Network Model for Service Ecosystems

Abstract

Services flourish drastically along with the trend of Everything as a Service (EaaS). Over the years, services have become more and more interconnected to facilitate trans-boundary collaboration in business and technology levels for creating and delivering distinct new values to customers. This phenomenon is called Internet of Services (IoS). IoS arises and evolves in terms of tremendous discrete decisions made by individual service stakeholders, and its structure and evolution show quite similar characteristics of the ones of natural ecosystems. We propose a novel multi-layer network model to describe the static structure and dynamic evolution traces of service ecosystems. Different from traditional models which are usually focused on specific service types and granularity levels, our model comprehensively covers the interconnections between stakeholders, services delivery channels, service functional and non-functional features and business domains. “Event” and “event chains” which are extracted from public news corpus are imported into the model as triggers of service ecosystem evolution and evolutionary relations are introduced into the model delineate evolution traces. Elements, relations, and application scenarios of this model are introduced in detail. Qualitative comparison with state-of-the-art models shows that our model has a higher degree of coverage of fine-grained elements/relations of service ecosystem and higher interpretability. Supplementary materials are provided to help understand how to build the model based on external data. In our opinion, this work lays a solid base for the exploration of structural characteristics and evolution laws of IoS.