Business Administration and Economics

Software services play a central role in our daily lives, whether we are retrieving up-to-the-minute information from Google or route24, viewing video clips and pictures on YouTube or fotocommunity, or trading goods on Amazon or eBay. The rapid growth in the range of available options and changing user demands will lead to a dramatic increase in the number of software services in the future. This development raises a number of technological and social research issues, such as how to keep the complexity of services in check in future, and whether services can be built and combined in such a way that they are self-configuring, self-managing, self-adapting and self-correcting.
The Software Systems Engineering (SSE)research group headed by Prof. Klaus Pohl addresses these and other research questions in software services. SSE is a member of NEXOF-RA, an integrated project which is funded by the European Commission and deals with medium-term issues of applied research. In partnership with leading European organisations (e. g. Alcatel-Lucent, Atos Origin, British Telecom, Engineering, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Sun Microsystems, Thales), SSE is developing a European reference architecture for software services under NEXOF-RA over the next two years. The aim of this reference architecture is to enable a smooth interaction and combination of services across organisational boundaries. More information is available on www.nexof-ra.eu.
The SSE is also pursuing some longer-term goals in its research. One example is the inter­disciplinary S-Cube excellence cluster, which is coordinated by Prof. Pohl and funded by theEuropean Commission. In S-Cube, the SSE working group and 70 researchers from 16 leadingEuropean research institutions are investigating new approaches to self-adapting software services, innovative techniques to guarantee service quality, and new requirements engineering methods for innovative software services. For more information see www.s-cube-network.eu.
If companies and universities are to tailor their products to the needs of their customers and remain competitive, they must make use of modern information technologies. The diversity of research activities at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics reflects the close connections between market design and company activities on the one hand, and current developments in computer science on the other. Notsurprisingly, the internet is a central element in all the research projects presented here.