IBM teams up with EU on e-services research

IBM hopes to increase system reliability by reducing functional errors

IBM has announced two research projects in collaboration with academia, industry partners and the European Union designed to investigate ways of bolstering the reliability of large mission critical systems, and help firms streamline and improve e-services.

The first initiative, dubbed Pincette, is a three-year collaborative project designed to create new technology that could reduce costs by automating the analysis and testing of large complex systems, and detect and eliminate errors before they escalate, said IBM.

The company expects the project to increase system reliability by achieving a reduction of at least 70 per cent in functional errors.

"The goal behind Pincette is to greatly simplify the task of ensuring that these complex systems run flawlessly through new automated capabilities that remove costly faults or errors with minimal human intervention," said Daniel Kroenig of Oxford University, one of the research partners.

"This is an exciting, cost-effective solution that combines simplicity with high reliability."

The second IBM project focuses on developing a computer science model to save the time and costs associated with co-ordinating cloud-based services and deploying blends of these "e-services".

The Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI) framework will aim to reduce the design and deployment time of e-services blends by 40 per cent over conventional business process management techniques, and automate 90 per cent of the data transformations needed to support them, according to IBM research scientist Fabiana Fournier.

The framework can be applied to a broad variety of cases, including supply chain and human resources, and can enable a "new way of doing business processes ", Fournier said.

"It's a new way of modelling, maintaining, designing and implementing e-services," she added. "IT and business people have a common language, and design can be done at a business level yet be executable without implementing any code."