Virtual Organisation by Service Virtualisation: Conceptual Model and e-Science Application

This work is supported by Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship grant MEIF-CT2005-025239 within the 6 European Community Framework Programme. See project website http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/c.zirpins/paris for additional information. Virtual organisation of collaborative networks frequently demands for information and communication technology to support coordination of crossorganisational business process chains. Service-oriented software technologies provide promising means to share software processes and services in collaborative networks but miss organisational abstractions and methodology. This paper proposes a conceptual model to mediate between organisational and technical levels. It introduces the concept of virtual business service to represent virtual organisations as service production networks and to support their coordination by means of service-oriented software technology. For illustration, we apply the proposed model to an e-Science scenario. We foster computational chemistry research by organisational virtualisation of a highthroughput computing laboratory. In particular, we model a polymorph prediction experiment as a virtual scientific service that facilitates planning and control of experimentation in a virtual research laboratory.