OPUCE
OPUCE (Open Platform for User-Centric Creation and Execution) is a research project under Information Society Technologies (IST) priority of the 6th Framework Program of the European Community, Contract No. 34101.
OPUCE is an Integrated Project aimed at developing a complete and global platform for the dynamic creation and delivery of user services and software The purpose of this project is to bridge advances in networking, communication and information technology services towards a unique service environment where personalized services will be dynamically created and provisioned by the end-user itself regardless of ambiance and location.
The project will produce an open service infrastructure to enable users for easy service creation and deployment in heterogeneous environments and ambiances, allowing services to be accessed in a seamless way by a multitude of devices connected via different networks. It will have tangible benefits to end-users as it will enrich services variety and relevance to their needs, and to service providers as it will ease the service creation and extend the scope of services that can be offered. It will leverage the business of SMEs by facilitating quick creation and deployment of a new range of services as “smart users” by ad-hoc cooperation with other business players. From this the number of service providers and users will increase and consequently the amount of equipment sold by manufacturers, which will provide the enabling platform elements.
The main objectives of the project are the following:
- Design, implement and ultimately deliver a global software infrastructure of business enabled collaborative and dynamic loosely coupled services.
- Provide a infrastructure where end-users and third party service developers can build innovative and integrated services in an easy and interactive way.
- The infrastructure will support adaptability and composability of services and context awareness regarding users, networks and terminals.
Such new platform will be based on reliable open source software, by integrating existing technology components and platforms into a unified software infrastructure as well as investigating new technologies where necessary in order to achieve the project’s objectives: including active participation in open source projects. OPUCE will also rely on the results of other EU projects for some components.
Thus, in order to achieve such a broad vision, a new dimension will come up that require new approaches in software industry that will be addressed in this project with the following detailed and verifiable scientific and technological objectives:
- To specify a service lifecycle model and the relationships among all its phases, including creation, deployment, instantiation, maintenance, provisioning and consumption.
- To analyse the mainstream business models involved in such lifecycle, since different business relationship among various business roles would have different requirement for the architecture of the open service infrastructure. In order to support the service lifecycle of personalized applications all the phases have to define the role of the various actors (end-user, terminals, network operators, service providers, content providers, service developer and regulator) in the value chain.
- To decompose applications into elementary functionalities and components that can be reused and reorganized in order to create personalized environments adapted to customers and market needs. With this support, a business process can invoke simpler services accordingly to achieve a more complex one in order to enhance performance regarding the moment and their own requirements.
- To create the missing link between software and hardware architectures, which is to build the Service Aware Network Infrastructure (SANI) which plugs in between SOA and computing grid with the necessary resource functions to optimise the data transport and end-to-end quality in service delivery. This is done by enabling the different network nodes involved in the execution of distributed services to become part of the computing grid.
- To guarantee cross-operator and cross-network service availability and service execution which need dedicated open software systems and a new abstraction layer between services and execution.
- To combine both fixed and mobile network capabilities allowing the creation of services based on the interaction of the capabilities of both, including convergence, compatibility and mapping between fixed data and mobile data as well as consistency across networks.
- To include new concepts for system to systems communication using service discovery networks where security, authentication, QoS and charging (including SLA policy handling) are provided by networks operators.
- To provide functional tools such as libraries or integrated environments for 3rd parties (SME, service/content providers, developers) with no deep knowledge of the communication infrastructure, as well as for the end-user itself to create its own services.
- To provide security and accounting mechanisms to control the access to the platform by 3rd parties and end-users, both from a functional (service access) and non-functional (service creation and management) perspective.
- To offer self-management and self-organising distributed network configurations for enhanced structural redundancy and service scalability.