Parallel Service Management Framework and Application to Railway Station Layout Planning

Abstract

People always say that the customer is god, but do they really understand this god? In practice, the nature of service, such as its intangibility and heterogeneity, makes the effective management of service operations difficult. To better incorporate human behaviors and other complex factors to facilitate service management decisions, the authors propose a new approach called parallel service management. PSM, which follows the ACP framework, is an emerging methodology in complex systems modeling and analysis. In PSM, customer agents, service employee agents, service organization agents, and the service environment construct an artificial service system, which can run in parallel with the real service system. The authors developed an agent-based artificial service system for the Chengdu East Railway Station, which let them make better layout planning decisions. The modification plan was then implemented in the station and achieved significant increase in store entering rate. Statistical comparison proves PSM's potential to enhance the performance of the real service systems.