Modeling Hierarchical Resources Within a Unified Ontology - A Position Paper

no issnResource-Intensive Software Ecosystems (RISE) can mainly be found in production management but also in virtually any socio-technical environment. RISE appear prominently in the form of smart grids or cloud environments where optimizing resource utilization and allocation becomes the most important aspect for competitive service provision. In such a context, the need for unified ontologies supported by adaptive software (i.e., software able to learn from and act on its environment) is highly attractive. Indeed, resources are mostly not monolithic entities but active and collaborative agents often organized in a hierarchical manner. A hierarchy implies multiple levels of abstraction leading to resource allocation on different levels of organization – with abstractions being relevant for both inter- and intra-organization resource management. Once adequately defined, the use of constraint-based optimization algorithms on those multiple levels can provide efficient resource allocation. We apply, in this paper, ontological elements to model resources in a unified manner on multiple levels onto an example taken from distributed energy management. Then we present algorithmic ideas to organize the hierarchy of these resources.status: publishe