Abstract
The “transboundary”, an emerging phenomenon in the Internet service ecosystem, is leading to the flourishing of innovative services. A transboundary service incorporates services, resources, and technologies from multiple domains into its business to create a particular competitive advantage and unique user experiences. It is difficult to comprehensively consider all the constraints from multiple domains to precisely design the nonfunctional characteristics of transboundary services, such as quality attributes and capability attributes. We propose a two-phase quality design method for transboundary services called value quality deployment-quality capability deployment (VQD-QCD) based on quality function deployment (QFD). Given the restrictions of transboundary services, VQD-QCD translates the value expectations of multiple stakeholders into an optimal configuration for global quality parameters (GQPs), local quality parameters, and capability parameters. Details of VQD are illustrated. Considering the inherent vagueness and uncertainty of relationships between value expectations and GQPs, and among GQPs, fuzzy least absolute regression and fuzzy nonlinear programming methods are incorporated into QFD to identify the quantitative relations between value indicators and GQPs, and among GQPs, and obtain an optimal configuration scheme for GQPs. Usability of the proposed method is validated through a case study on the “DiDi mobile transportation service”, which is a representative transboundary service in China. Compared with the current method, which is inaccurate and inefficient because its translation between value expectations and relevant quality and capability parameters is artificial and subjective, the proposed method integrates fuzzy least absolute regression and fuzzy nonlinear programming methods into QFD, which facilitate transboundary service designers to precisely and efficiently design the quality and capability characteristics of innovative services in the manner of semiautomatisation, which promotes the innovative design of transboundary services.
Highlights
In terms of quality/capability design, the “transboundary” makes it difficult to comprehensively consider all the constraints from multiple domains to precisely design the nonfunctional characteristics of transboundary services, as shown on the right-hand side of Figure 1. ese nonfunctional characteristics consist of global quality parameters (GQPs) attached to the transboundary service, local quality parameters (LQPs) attached to the activities, and capability parameters (CPs) attached to the resources. erefore, in this paper, we focus on the phase of quality and capability design
Compared with traditional service design in which design objectives are solely determined by one service provider, the design objectives of a transboundary service originate from the convergence of multiple stakeholders of the service. ese stakeholders are attached to different business domains, have different value expectations, and own different service capabilities. ere might be implicit conflicts or correlations among these nonfunctional perspectives, and the design of a transboundary service has to carefully consider all these perspectives and seek a global trade-off between them so that the stakeholders can collaborate effectively to reach the shared goal of the transboundary service
value quality deployment-quality capability deployment (VQD-QCD) can be applied to seek a trade-off between high-level value expectations and realworld service capabilities, and the optimal configuration scheme for GQPs, LQPs, and CPs can be obtained in a top-down manner
Summary
Received 18 October 2019; Revised 12 December 2019; Accepted 1 February 2020; Published 24 February 2020. Given the restrictions of transboundary services, VQD-QCD translates the value expectations of multiple stakeholders into an optimal configuration for global quality parameters (GQPs), local quality parameters, and capability parameters. Considering the inherent vagueness and uncertainty of relationships between value expectations and GQPs, and among GQPs, fuzzy least absolute regression and fuzzy nonlinear programming methods are incorporated into QFD to identify the quantitative relations between value indicators and GQPs, and among GQPs, and obtain an optimal configuration scheme for GQPs. Usability of the proposed method is validated through a case study on the “DiDi mobile transportation service”, which is a representative transboundary service in China. Compared with the current method, which is inaccurate and inefficient because its translation between value expectations and relevant quality and capability parameters is artificial and subjective, the proposed method integrates fuzzy least absolute regression and fuzzy nonlinear programming methods into QFD, which facilitate transboundary service designers to precisely and efficiently design the quality and capability characteristics of innovative services in the manner of semiautomatisation, which promotes the innovative design of transboundary services
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