December 4th (Friday) , 2026
The Model-a-Thon is a “modeling hackathon” addressing the challenge that modern businesses are becoming increasingly networked and the information systems connected at speeds and pace only possible due to AI. This poses a multitude of challenges for EM, such as keeping stakeholders involved, ensuring that the emerging AI applications are still aligned with the business, and ensuring business resilience. One more dimension of the change is the need to adopt new and emerging technologies when faced with new challenges and threats. Such challenges require new ways of looking at the existing structures, others require new and extended collaborations.
The notion of a business ecosystem has been known to the PoEM community for a number of years. The aim of this hackathon is to facilitate joint business ecosystem thinking, how it can be used in the era of AI, and how EM can contribute. To this end will discuss the current and emerging challenges, and jointly create models and meta-models. These could then be further elaborated into joint research papers, methods, tools, as well as projects.
The format of the hackathon is free. The overall ideas for the hackathon are
- To have an exciting and interactive modeling event designed to foster collaboration among researchers attending the conference.
- To address how the Digital business ecosystems are proliferating
- To discuss how agentic AI brings a new set of challenges related to privacy, risks, security and resilience among others
- To strive towards a common agreement on modeling digital business ecosystems and more so on representing generative AI aspects
Participants are welcome to bring their existing models or use cases to the discussion. We aim for two 120 minutes long working sessions with a lunch break and a wrap-up session.
Among the possible results of the session will be a Digital Business Ecosystems for Generative AI (Generative AI Digital Business Ecosystem) meta-model and research paper.
Organisers
- Janis Grabis, Riga Technical University, Latvia
- Jolita Ralyté, University of Geneva, Switzerland
- Janis Stirna, Stockholm University, Sweden