DBE: Funding Success

One of the three successful EU Framework 6 proposals for the TSSG in the first call was DBE. This project started in November 2003, when the team of 20 partners including business analysts, scientists and technologists began work on this challenging research programme.

The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) aims to provide an open-source distributed environment that can support the spontaneous evolution and composition of (not necessarily open-source) software services, components, and applications.

The approach rests on the assumption that there is much to be gained from basing the complex and distributed software technology that the DBE will require on design principles and theoretical models derived from the physical and biological sciences. Thus, theories of self-organisation and algorithms from evolutionary computation are of key importance.

The idea is to generate, through the DBE, software that can adapt to the SMEs rather than the other way around. In this manner the project aims to provide SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) with a new cost-effective technology paradigm for achieving business results through the innovative use of technologiess, reducing their time to market and facilitating the enlargement of their business networks.