It is our pleasure to hereby invite you to submit Papers or Invited (Special) Issue proposals to be published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. You can also find this Call for Paper “Smart Services and Software Platforms” at http://www.ieee-tems.org/call-for-papers-smart-services-and-software-platforms/.

With this letter, we would like to provide you with all the necessary information for a successful participation in this Special Issue, and we look forward to your submissions.


Submission Details for First Deadline (June 30, 2019)
Length of abstract: 5-10 sentences
Language: English
Format: IEEE Format (https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html)


Schedule
Interested authors send abstracts by December 15, 2018 (UPDATE: now extended to June 30, 2019)
Decisions on acceptance of abstracts: January 31, 2019 (UPDATE: date tba)
Papers submitted: by August 31, 2019 (UPDATE: date tba)


Submission Process
Please prepare your manuscript according to IEEE-TEM’s guidelines (http://www.ieee-tems.org/guidelines-for-authors/) and submit it to the journal’s Manuscript Central site (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tem-ieee).
Please clearly state in the cover letter that the submission is for this special issue.


Overview and Motivation of the Special Issue “Smart Services and Software Platforms”
The ubiquitous availability of digital connected devices foster the rise of more and more computational services in complex cyber-physical systems. Especially software innovations in the areas of Data Science, Machine Learning, as well as software architecture and engineering facilitate the arising of smart services and software platforms, which can operate context- and self-aware in real time (Anastasopoulos et al. 2005, Herold et al., 2008; Rausch et al., 2013). This progress is observable in the public, in the design of the customer-provider interface (Zerr et al., 2017) and in the industrial space under denotations such as Smart City, Smart Home, or Industrial Internet (Bartelt et al., 2005; Rausch et al. 2009). A unifying phenomenon of this class of software-based systems is that traditional scientific models are not able to sufficiently support runtime composition or decentralized and concurrent engineering processes.

From the technology perspective, traditional top-down and iterative engineering processes for software-based systems are currently reaching their performance edge. As system architectures become more open and interconnected, they have to be seen as “service ecosystems” to co-create value in context (Vargo & Lusch, 2016,). Therefore, a central management of services life-cycles is not only not scalable, but simply not feasible (Huber et al., 1998). In analogy to ecosystems arising in organic habitats, engineering processes and future technologies must allow for self-adaptive and emergent system behavior. Hence, open-loop control systems must dynamically find throughout the system lifecycle the just-in-time equilibrium based on available data, services and processes as well as on human shareholder requirements (Graupner et al., 2015).

Smart service components in Service- and IT ecosystems with independent life-cycles are developed in asynchronous engineering processes and are connected at runtime on ambient software platforms (Liu et al. 2016). Besides, heterogeneous service interfaces and data sources without a centrally predefined and semantically standardized scheme have to be integrated and prepared to be machine-readable (Klus et al., 2015). Service systems in this ecosystem context are possibly composed automatically and are temporarily alive. The architectural knowledge to compose smart service systems at design- and run-time must be considered by service developer and platform provider (Burzlaff&Bartelt, 2017).

This call for papers targets a special issue on the topic of development processes and technologies for smart services and enfolding service ecosystems as well as their software platforms (Botzenhard et al., 2016; Gass et al., 2014). It addresses especially the question how service providers can develop connectable smart services or service ecosystems in temporary alive system compositions. We would like papers to explore the technologies and engineering management perspective rather than the technology itself. Among others, papers based on the Service Dominant Logic (SDL) approach to contribute to the extension of “midrange theories” concerning SDL are welcome (Vargo & Lush 2017). We emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the topic by explicitly inviting scholars from various disciplines to address the following questions, among others:


Leading Questions
What are the technical interrelations between applications and platform in smart service engineering?
What kind of computational support has to be provided by the software platform to successfully run smart services?
How can semantic standardization be managed and supported by platforms in asynchronous development processes and in a decentral manner?
What are the key challenges for emergent service generation based on predefined goals and how can they be solved in dynamic and self-adaptive systems?
How can smart services be scaled at the market?
What are appropriate Development Tools and approaches to create smart service-ecosystems based on the principles of the SDL Approach?


Suggested Topics
Semantic standardization of data, software services and process in asynchronous and decentralized engineering
Novel engineering processes for smart and emergent service systems
Approaches for software platform support of smart service systems
Component-based software engineering for self-adaptive systems of cyber-physical systems
Approaches for the decentral management and computation of service and system composition
Resilience of smart service ecosystems
Dependability, privacy, security aspects of smart service systems
State-of-the-Art regarding (automated) reuse of architecture knowledge
Industrial experiments and case studies dealing with smart services and platforms
Smart Service Marketing
Context Modeling to create value in context within complex service-ecosystems


Contact
If you have any questions, please contact the Organization Team at cfp-smartserviceplatforms@uni-mannheim.de.


Editor-in-Chief (Journal)
Tugrul U Daim, Ph.D. and PICMET Fellow | Department of Engineering and Technology Management, Portland State University


Guest Editors
Dr. Christian Bartelt | Institute for Enterprise Systems, University of Mannheim | bartelt@es.uni-mannheim.de
Dr. Jürgen Jähnert | Baden-Württemberg Connected | jaehnert@bwcon.de
Prof. Dr. Alexander Mädche | Institute of Information Systems and Marketing, Karlsruher Institute of Technology | alexander.maedche@kit.edu
Prof. Dr. Andreas Rausch | Software Systems Engineering Institute, Technical University of Clausthal | andreas.rausch@tu-clausthal.de
Prof. Dr. Konrad Zerr | Services Marketing, University of Applied Science Pforzheim | konrad.zerr@hs-pforzheim.de