In the context of the 11th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2013), which took place from December 2-5 in Berlin, Germany, Manfred Reichert organized a tutorial on flexibility challenges for composite software services. The ICSOC conference series is a leading international forum for presenting and discussing current research on service-oriented computing.

In his tutorial, Manfred presented parts of his Springer book on process flexibility. On one hand, he discussed the flexibility challenges that emerge in the context of composite services. On the other, he presented concrete solution approaches for handling these challenges.

Manfred Reichert - Managing Flexibility Challenges for Composite Services: Scenarios, Technologies, Tools (PDF download) - Berlin, Germany, December 4th, 2013

Abstract:
In today's dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process and service agility as competitive advantages to address business trends like increasing product/service variability or faster time-to-market, and to enable a close alignment of business with information technology. Along this trend, process awareness and service orientation have become prevalent paradigms in enterprise computing, and a new generation of process- and service-oriented information systems has emerged. Using real-world cases from various application domains, this tutorial will present a review of fundamental flexibility challenges that exist for process- and service-oriented information systems. In particular, it will give insights into concepts, methods and technologies that foster flexibility for all phases of the process and service lifecycle. Amongst others, this includes flexibility support for pre-specified composite services as well as for loosely specified ones whose schema is only partially specified at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain schema parts are deferred to the run-time.