The Service-Bond Paradigm - Potentials for a Sustainable, ICT-enabled Future

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new service-bond paradigm leveraging ICT agents to promote sustainable, collaborative, and incremental global development, exemplified through a smart house use case involving utility services.

Contribution

It proposes a novel service-bond paradigm that extends traditional services to enhance sustainability and demonstrates its practical application with ICT agents in smart homes.

Findings

Service bonds can be generalized to multiple entities.

Time-modulated implementation reduces risks.

ICT agents effectively enable service bonds in smart houses.

Abstract

The service paradigm as we know it has gone through a long journey of evolution and improvement, and it seems that a service-oriented vision to activities in general could serve as a potential platform for the global transition to a sustainable future. However, it is also apparent that the services themselves are required to move beyond their traditional definition in order to prevent any secondary side effect. Here, a new paradigm is proposed based on bonding between entities involved in a service interaction, service chaining, or service orchestration. It is purposed to serve as a vehicle to approach sustainability at the global level in a manner that is thoughtful, collaborative, and incremental. Time-modulated implementation of the proposed service-bond paradigm is considered in order to reduce the associated risks and liabilities. The service bonds are then simply generalized toward representing bonding among more than two entities. Finally, a practical application of ICT agents in enabling the service bonds is presented in a use case related to smart houses. In this use case, some ICT-based agents (federal regulars, among other ICT agents) are considered to represent and govern services and service bonds of a household with external entities such as utilities.