Service representation for capturing and reusing design knowledge in product and service families using object-oriented concepts and an ontology

Abstract

For mass customisation, companies are increasing their efforts to reduce cost and lead time when developing new products and services while satisfying individual customer needs. By sharing and reusing assets such as components, processes, information, and knowledge across a family of products and services, companies can efficiently develop a set of differentiated economic offerings by improving flexibility and responsiveness of product and service development. Based on extending the concepts from module-based product family design, this article introduces a methodology to develop a service ontology for capturing and reusing design knowledge in a service family by integrating object-oriented concepts and ontologies. Object-oriented concepts provide service analysis tools for describing a business process or a workflow process in a service. A function-process matrix is used to identify the relationships between the service functions and the service processes that are offered as part of a service. In this article, a service process model is introduced to describe a service based on a sequence using a graph model. An ontology is employed to define properties that consist of attributes and behaviours for representing a service in a service hierarchy structure. We apply the proposed methodology to develop a service ontology using a case study involving a family of banking services.