1996 - European Telework Week

Annex 2
ACTS and the Chain Concertation Mechanism
• Horizontal actions
A series of “horizontal” actions will cross the boundaries between the ACTS
work areas, concentrating efforts of the different participants. These actions
will create demonstrations and trial systems to bring to a wider audience
knowledge of the benefits of using the IBC network.
Communication is about linking distant places. The European IBC network must
interoperate with networks under development in the United States and Japan. And the
European Union has a special responsibility to assist the development of
telecommunications networks in Central and Eastern Europe.
2. PROJECT CHAINS
In the ACTS Programme, many projects have "deliverable" (or "dependency")
relationships with one another, for example one develops components for another's
prototype, which may in turn be validated in yet another project. At the most basic level,
the deliverable may be the communication of key findings or other information. This sort
of interaction is not by far the only interaction between projects.
A structure for this integrated set of projects can be identified to optimise meaningful
inter-relationships and information exchange between the actors, and to maximise the
contribution that National Hosts on similar trial infrastructure sites can make to the
programme and to dissemination of information.
A first approximation to such a structure is obtained by assigning the sub-areas of the
workplan action to one of several layers or domains broadly corresponding to those in
the OSI model:
• Applications
• Services
• Networks
• Technologies
and
• Programme Management
While such a simple model can give an insight into the emerging programme structure, it
cannot adequately reflect the dynamics of the programme in the time dimension. While
there is a potential future vertical flow of 'networks' contributing to 'services' contributing
to 'applications' and a horizontal flow of 'technology' feeding into 'components', feeding
into 'systems' and feeding into 'systems integration' projects in different domains will be
working in parallel.
This domain model underpins the concept which has been identified as the main
concertation mechanism in ACTS - the project chain.
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