ICSOC, the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, is the premier international forum for academics, industry researchers, developers, and practitioners to report and share groundbreaking work in service-oriented computing. ICSOC fosters cross-community scientific excellence by gathering experts from various disciplines, such as services science, data science, management science, business-process management, distributed systems, wireless and mobile computing, cloud and edge computing, cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things (IoT), scientific workflows, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and services and software engineering.

ICSOC provides a premier international forum for presenting results and discussing ideas that further our knowledge and understanding of the various aspects (e.g., application and system aspects) related to Service Computing and identify research challenges in new research areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, IoT, and emerging technologies including quantum computing.

ICSOC 2024, the 22nd event in this series, will take place in Tunis, Tunisia, from December 3 – 6, 2024. Following on the ICSOC tradition, it will feature visionary keynote presentations, research and industry presentations, a vision track, workshops, tutorials, and a PhD track. We invite interested researchers, students, practitioners, and professionals to submit their original research contributions to ICSOC 2024.

Submissions / Review Model

Early submissions: Authors are invited to consider early submissions. In the early submission round, only papers submitted as full/regular papers will be considered, and they will go through a full peer-review process. An early submitted paper that is accepted will be included in the proceedings. An early submitted paper that is rejected can be still revised and submitted to the normal submission round by the given deadline. If the authors of an early submitted paper that is rejected decide to resubmit their paper to the normal submission round, they will have to include an appendix (maximum 2 pages) describing how they have addressed the comments received by the reviewers from the early submission.

Normal submissions: Authors are welcome to submit papers to the normal submission round by the given deadline. They need to submit an abstract by 10 July 2024 (firm deladline). After the normal submission deadline, the papers resubmitted from the early submission round and those submitted only to the normal submission round will undergo the same review process as other submissions. The decisions made from this normal review procedure will be final and no resubmission will be permitted afterwards.

Anonymous submissions: ICSOC implements a double-blind reviewing process. Author names and affiliations should not appear in the paper. The authors should make a reasonable effort not to reveal their identities or institutional affiliations in the text, figures, photos, links, or other data that is contained in the paper. Authors’ prior work should be preferably referred to in the third person; if this is not feasible, the references should be blinded. Submissions that violate these requirements will be rejected without review. The list of authors cannot be changed after the acceptance decision is made unless approved by the Program Chairs.

It should be noted that unformatted papers and papers beyond the page limit may not be reviewed.

Open Science: Authors are urged to share all research artefacts—like datasets, source code, and supplementary materials—via reputable public repositories such as Zenodo, Figshare, GitHub, or institutional archives. To support open science, these artefacts should be released under open data licenses, like CC0 or CC-BY 4.0, allowing for broad use and redistribution. Public repositories offer stable, long-term access to research outputs, providing a reliable source for references and citations. On the other hand, cloud-based services like Dropbox and Google Docs are not recommended due to their volatile links, which can expire or change, causing broken references and unreliable access. Additionally, these cloud services may lack robust metadata and versioning features. Therefore, authors should opt for dedicated repositories to ensure data preservation and consistent availability. Supplementary materials and code must be anonymized to avoid revealing personal information or identifying specific institutions. This includes removing or masking hardcoded file paths, URLs, or any other data that could indicate login credentials or institutional affiliations. To facilitate this process, tools like Anonymous for Open Science can help anonymize GitHub repositories, ensuring that sensitive information is not disclosed. Similarly, public repositories such as Zenodo and Figshare provide features for sharing research artefacts anonymously, offering a secure way to maintain confidentiality while promoting open science.

Special Issues

As per its tradition, ICSOC 2024 will also feature some special issues in high-impact journals. A selection of the top accepted papers will be invited for special issues in journals, the specific list will be announced soon.

Areas of Interest

ICSOC is the premier international forum for presenting the most recent and significant research contributions in service-oriented computing. These include, but are not limited to:

• Service design, specification, discovery, customization, composition, and deployment
• Service change management
• Theoretical foundations of Service Engineering
• Service monitoring and adaptive management
• Secure service lifecycle development
• Privacy management aspects for services
• Secure service lifecycle development
• Privacy management aspects for services
• Trust management for services
• Service mining and analytics
• Data-provisioning services
• Cloud service management
• Cloud and fog computing
• Edge service orchestration
• Metaverse services
• IoT services
• Lightweight service deployment and management
• Social networks and services
• Innovative service business models
• Service-based business process management

In addition to the traditional topics, which include theoretical and empirical evaluations, as well as practical and industrial experiences, with emphasis on results that solve open research problems and have significant impact on the field of digital services and service-oriented computing, ICSOC welcomes new 4 focus areas, which are presented below.

Focus Area 1: Service Oriented Technology Basics and Trends

Chair: Farouk TOUMANI

The focus area targets outstanding, innovative contributions encompassing both theoretical and empirical assessments in services oriented technology basics and trends, alongside practical insights from industrial experiences. It places emphasis on outcomes that address unresolved research issues and demonstrate significant influence within the realm of digital services and service-oriented computing.

Topics that are part of this focus area may include but are not limited to:

• Service-oriented Engineering
  • Service design, specification, discovery, customization, composition, and deployment
  • Service validation and test
  • Service change management
  • Intelligent context-aware interfaces
  • Theoretical foundations of Service Engineering
  • Transformation of monolithic applications to microservices
• Run-time Service Operations and Management
  • Service execution middleware
  • Service monitoring and adaptive management
  • Workload compliance management
  • Microservices deployment and management
• Security, privacy and trust for services
  • Secure service lifecycle development
  • Privacy management aspects for services
  • Contract based security approaches
  • Secure service composition
  • Trust management for services
• Services in Organizations, Business, and Society
  • Social networks and services
  • Cost and pricing of services
  • Service marketplaces and ecosystems
  • Innovative service business models
  • Business process management

Focus Area 2: AI for Services and as-a-Service

Chair: Xumin Liu

The widespread availability of the Internet, edge computing, and ubiquitous computing devices has led to the accumulation of massive datasets, enabling the extraction of valuable insights into services, applications, and domains. (Big) Data analysis has emerged as a crucial methodology and set of tools for extracting knowledge from large and complex datasets, including processes, transactions, web/event logs, and user activity histories. Artificial Intelligence (AI) empowers computers to autonomously process vast amounts of data, either fully or partially, to comprehend the input and derive insights from it. This approach typically involves a "learn by doing" methodology to achieve artificial intelligence (AI), allowing computers to learn and make decisions without explicit programming. (Generative) AI has become pivotal in enhancing intelligence, operational efficiency, and decision-making across various applications. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) revolutionize service-oriented applications by generating synthetic data, enhancing personalization, and improving natural language understanding. They enable creative content generation, bolster adversarial defense, and cater to evolving user needs, redefining the landscape of service provision. In many instances, AI itself serves as a public service, benefiting society at large.

Topics that are part of this focus area, as they relate to service-oriented computing, may include but are not limited to:

• Generative AI and LLM
• Data cleaning and preparation
• Data Transformation and Integration
• Process mining and anomaly detection
• Visual techniques for big data
• Efficient data processing
• Information access and retrieval
• Exploratory data science
• Services for big data
• Service mining and analytics
• Data-provisioning services
• Services related linked open data
• Network architectures
• Graph neural networks
• Domain adaptation and transfer learning
• Event detection and tracking
• Neural ranking and neural recommendation
• Security and privacy of AI/machine learning
• Evaluation, performance studies, and benchmarks

Focus Area 3: Novel Service Frameworks for Cloud Continuum and Smart Environments

Chair: Naouel Moha

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims at turning every physical object into a “thing” on the Internet. It is made up of billions of “things” connected with each other: simple sensors, cameras, wearables, appliances, traffic lights, cars, and so on. The IoT involves harnessing the data and functionalities provided by “things” to enable novel smart services that benefit enterprises, industries, and society.

Topics that are part of this focus area, as they relate to service-oriented computing, may include but are not limited to:

• Services on the Cloud
  • Cloud service management,
  • Cloud workflow management,
  • Cloud brokers and coordination across multiple resource managers ,
  • XaaS (everything as a service including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS),
  • Workload partitioning, balancing, and transformation
• Services at the Edge
  • Cloud and fog computing,
  • Edge service orchestration,
  • Lightweight service deployment and management,
  • Quality of Service (QoS) in edge services,
  • Security, privacy, and trust of edge services,
  • Services in the Internet of Things (IoT)/Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Embedded and real-time services,
  • RFID, sensor data, and services related to the IoT/CPS,
  • Services for IoT/CPS platforms and applications,
  • Service oriented protocols for IoT/CPS applications,
  • IoT as-a-service,
  • Smart cities and connected cars,
  • IoT security,
  • Smart sensors and IoT for large scale applications (manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, power grids, etc.),
  • Energy efficiency and sustainability in IoT,
  • Embedded and real-time services

Focus Area 4: Emerging Technologies

Chair: Cinzia Cappiello

Emerging technologies bring new possibilities for more effective and efficient processing and integration of data and services. Thus, for example, we are living in the “quantum decade” in which quantum computers (whether annealers or gate-based) are starting to be used to solve previously unimaginable problems. Another example is the emergence of a new generation of chatbots and virtual assistants supported by the recent advances in natural language processing. All this offers new challenges and challenges that impact on the architecture, design and deployment of service systems. These and other emerging technologies, whether used individually or together, can have a major impact on the security, sustainability, connectivity, etc. of service-oriented computing.

Topics that are part of this focus area, as they relate to service-oriented computing, may include but are not limited to:

• Quantum Service Computing
• Digital Twins
• 3D Printing/additive Manufacturing Techniques
• Blockchain
• Robotic Process Automation
• Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
• Low-code / No-code Solutions
• Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
• Green IT
• 5G
• Metaverse Services
• Industry 4.0

We invite high-quality submissions of research papers describing original contributions that are unpublished and not under review elsewhere. The research papers will focus on traditional areas or in a specific focus area mentioned above. Research in each area will be considered strictly in the context of service-oriented computing. No papers would be accepted unless they clearly illustrate the contribution to the ICSOC areas of interest. It may even be desk-rejected.

Paper Submission

The conference solicits outstanding original research and practice papers on all aspects of service-oriented computing. Papers should clearly demonstrate the research or practical contribution, the relevance to the field, and the relationship to prior work. Submitted papers will be evaluated according to their rigor, significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. All papers will be reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.

Papers should be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS Formatting Guidelines. Submissions must be in English and must not exceed 15 pages. All papers must be submitted electronically to the Conference Submission System. Each paper must be submitted on or before the provided deadlines. Authors are kindly invited to respect the abstract submission deadline, set one week before the paper submission. The limit length of accepted papers should be 15 pages (including abstract, figures and references). The final submission should be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS Camera ready instructions.

For each accepted paper, at least one author must attend the conference and present the paper. The deadline for identifying and registering this individual author will be at the time when the camera-ready version is submitted.

All paper submissions will be handled through the EasyChair conference management system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icsoc2024