Abstract: Service orientation is the prevalent paradigm for modular distributed systems, giving rise to service ecosystems defined by software dependencies, which, at the same time, carry business and economic implications. And as the software evolves, so do the business relationships among the ecosystem participants with corresponding economic impact. Therefore, a more comprehensive model of software evolution is necessary in this context, in order to support the decision-making processes of the ecosystem participants. In this presentation, I will describe the service ecosystem as a market environment, with providers offering competitive services and evolving these services to attract more clients by better satisfying their requirements. Based on an economic model for calculating the costs and values associated with service evolution, I define a game-theoretic model to capture the interactions between providers and clients and support the providers’ decision-making process. I demonstrate the use of this model with a realistic example of a cloud-services ecosystem.


Short Bio: Marios Fokaefs is a PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr Eleni Stroulia at the Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Canada. His doctoral research is concerned with the evolution of service-oriented systems. More specifically, he has developed the WSDarwin toolkit to support the adaptation of client applications to evolved SOAP and REST web services. Moreover, he has studied the socio-economic aspect of the problem and has set forth the theoretical foundations for a decision-support system to guide providers into taking into consideration the software ecosystem and to calculate the optimal conditions under which a web service should evolve.
Marios Fokaefs received his MSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, Canada in 2010 and his BSc in Applied Informatics from the University of Macedonia, Greece in 2008. His research interests include, among others, object and service-oriented design, maintenance and evolution, collaborative and distributed software development, software engineering economics and social and economic networks.