From SOA to VOA: A Shift in Understanding the Operation and Evolution of Service Ecosystem

With the development of ICT (information and communications technology) and service economy, service ecosystem is emerging in a lot of fields, including E-commerce, O2O(Online To Offline) life service, healthcare service, cloud manufacturing, and so on. As a complex socio-technical system, the evolution of service ecosystem is the joint result of the interaction of the three heterogeneous networks, including social network, service network and value network. Under such circumstances, the traditional SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)-based analysis model is powerless. As a result, how to analyze the laws behind the evolution of service ecosystem is still a serious challenge in the field. This paper proposes a value oriented analysis framework (VOA) of service ecosystem, which can use value as a clue to describe the interaction of the three heterogeneous networks. In addition, a computational experiment system is established to verify the effectiveness of the VOA framework, which stimulates the effect of different intervention strategies on service ecosystem. The result shows that our analysis framework can provide new means and ideas for the analysis of service ecosystem.