Service Engineering Research Articles

The 5th Symposium on Service Engineering

The 5th Symposium on Service Engineering

Smart Service Engineering

Industry 4.0 has provided vast opportunities for manufacturing companies whilst simultaneously creating multiple challenges. In this new highly digitized globalized marketplace, manufacturing companies find themselves under pressure to become more service oriented and offer new innovative value offerings such as smart services. These are digital data-driven services that, generally, add value in conjunction with a physical product. However, classical methods of service engineering have not adapted sufficiently to the increasing digital components and requirements of smart services. This paper presents Smart Service Engineering as a novel service-engineering approach for industrial smart services. Smart Service Engineering draws from iterative development models and implements agile and customer-centric methods to decrease the overall development time and achieve an early market success. The paper focuses on the service development steps and presents the interaction and interconnection of different elements of smart services based on a case study research. Finally, the paper illustrates the successful application of the Smart Service Engineering approach and its impact on a German medium-sized company in the textile machine industry.

Layered Architectural Model for Collaborative Computing in Peripheral Autonomous Networks of Mobile Devices

Collaborative mobile computing is today one of the most popular paradigms of computing because of its impact on the performance and expansion of distributed systems and therefore on the development of Internet of Things. Due to the rapid progress in technologies of communication and smart mobile devices with the growing trend towards its use, many architectures of mobile collaborative computing have emerged to improve and organize the expand of Internet of Things, such as Cloud, Cloudlet, Fog, Edge, Mobile Edge, Mobile Cloudlet Computing, etc. In this paper, we first review their current layered architectural models and discuss their limits and challenges. Then, we will present a new architectural model: Collaborative Autonomous Networks of Mobile Devices Using Peer-to-Peer Communication that can be applied in many areas. Finally, a scenario of an emergency situation is presented to illustrate and highlight its requirements, such as supporting connectivity and engineering of data and services. Also, how the rescue process is addressing across different architecture layers.

Rescue Operation in the Air: A Case of Air India

Air India (AI), the public sector company, which had its beginning sixty five years ago, is involved in divestment process. It was beset with operational inefficiency and has been making losses for the last many years, with an accumulated loss of Rs. 46,256 crores between April 2010 to December 2017. To keep the airline in running condition, the government invested Rs. 26, 545 crores into the airline since April 2011. Finally, the government has decided to divest 76% stake in the company. A 100% stake is offered in its subsidiary Air India Express and a 50% stake on the branch which is handling ground operations. Its other subsidiaries-Alliance Air, Hotel Corporation of India, Air India Air Transport Services and Air India Engineering Services, are not offered for sale and would be transferred to a special purpose entity (SPV). Apart from financial re-structuring, focus has also shifted to organizational and managerial re-structuring too. For prospective buyers, the strengths of AI which could have attracted them to buy were its bilateral flying rights, lucrative international destinations, large fleet of wide bodied and narrow-bodied aircraft and a large customer base. However, these were offset by the huge debt burden and the large employee base. The government could not attract a single potential bidder for the company. The government was in a dilemma. It had to put on hold the divestment process. The future is bleak, whether the government will be able to revive the ailing airline remains to be seen. The objective of the case is to identify the reasons for divestment and the structure of divesting an enterprise. Also, to identify the financial, HR, operational and marketing implications of the process of divestment.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Special Section on Services and Software Engineering Towards Internetware

The six papers in this special section focuses on services and software computing. Services computing provides a foundation to build software systems and applications over the Internet as well as emerging hybrid networked platforms motivated by it. Due to the open, dynamic, and evolving nature of the Internet, new features were born with these Internet-scale and service-based software systems. Such systems should be situation- aware, adaptable, and able to evolve to effectively deal with rapid changes of user requirements and runtime contexts. These emerging software systems enable and require novel methods in conducting software requirement, design, deployment, operation, and maintenance beyond existing services computing technologies. New programming and lifecycle paradigms accommodating such Internet- scale and service-based software systems, referred to as Internetware, are inevitable. The goal of this special section is to present the innovative solutions and challenging technical issues, so as to explore various potential pathways towards Internet-scale and service-based software systems.

基于AOE + CDIO的汽车服务工程专业实验课程改革

基于AOE + CDIO的汽车服务工程专业实验课程改革

Bayesian Network Analysis for the Questionnaire Investigation on the Needs at Fuji Shopping Street Town under the View Point of Service Engineering

Shopping streets at local city in Japan became old and are generally declining. In this paper, the area rebirth and/or regional revitalization of shopping street are handled. Fuji city in Japan is focused. Four big festivals are held at Fuji city (two for Fuji Shopping Street Town and two for Yoshiwara Shopping Street Town). Many people visit these festivals including residents in that area. Therefore a questionnaire investigation to the residents and visitors is conducted during these periods in order to clarify residents and visitors’ needs for the shopping street, and utilize them to the plan building of the area rebirth and/or regional revitalization of shopping street. There is a big difference between Fuji Shopping Street Town and Yoshiwara Shopping Street Town. Therefore Fuji Shopping Street Town is focused in this paper. These are analyzed by using Bayesian Network. These are analyzed by sensitivity analysis and odds ratio is calculated to the results of sensitivity analysis in order to obtain much clearer results. The analysis utilizing Bayesian Network enabled us to visualize the causal relationship among items. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis brought us estimating and predicting the prospective visitors. Sensitivity analysis is performed by back propagation method. These are utilized for constructing a much more effective and useful plan building. Fruitful results are obtained. To confirm the findings by utilizing the new consecutive visiting records would be the future works to be investigated.

Smart City as a Service System: A Framework to Improve Smart Service Management

The paper proposes the re-conceptualization of the smart city as a service system, in line with the recent service theories, such as Service-Dominant logic and Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design. Starting from a short literature review about service system and smart city, a model characterized by a reticular configuration is proposed. The framework identifies the most adequate organizational layout to foster resources exchange, value co-creation and enhance co-learning among multiple actors. The goal is to highlight that the development of collaborative logics, resulting in continuous processes of cooperation between public and private decision-makers and citizens, allows multiplying moments of value creation as a result of synergistic interactions. This collaborative logic involves citizens, who are seen as a system of customers with whom objectives and knowledge are shared and with which the engagement must be sought, as they represent fundamental partners in achieving the specific objective of value co-creation. The proposed framework highlights the systemic nature of both the smart city and the service system and proposes practical and theoretical implications for public and private services management.

Storytelling about places: Tourism marketing in the digital age

Storytelling about places is recognized as a tool to enhance the reputation of regions as they compete for tourism and economic development spending in the digital age. Through digital media, people can be encouraged to tell their tourism stories and share their experiences.Our design approach integrates Service Science, Management, Engineering, plus Design, Arts and Public Policy (SSME + DAPP, so just SS) and Viable Systems Approach (VSA) perspectives. Storytelling can be managed in a local service system to enhance brand competitiveness. The way local governments and cultural organizations understand and encourage storytelling about places (“place storytelling”) can have a significant impact on the success of a region competing for tourism and development spending. Place storytelling enables local stakeholders to tell their personal stories about their beloved places.Our analysis and cases demonstrate that place storytelling enables strategic communication that supports sustainable competitive advantage. By means of an analysis of “Umbria on the Blog”, which is an innovative project which joins place and web 2.0, and “Il Mangiastorie”, which promotes wine and food and tourism of some Campania internal area, we highlight the relevance of managing place storytelling as a strategic communication involving stakeholders in the place-identity-building process.This paper presents a model of place storytelling that local governments and cultural organizations can use to encourage and manage stakeholder engagement in a multilevel process for improving regional service system marketing and communications in the digital age.

Decision Support Systems for IoT Based Infrastructures

Computation offloading divides enormous computational tasks across numerous computer resources, circumventing hardware limits. Edge computing can employ vast quantities of data, individual preferences, and clever algorithms by offloading smart models to high-performance cloud servers. We propose a getaway-centric IoT system to enable intelligent and autonomous IoT devices at the computer infrastructure's edge. Edge computing manages IoT devices by selecting and applying the best control factor from a pool of intelligent services. The cloud-based intelligent service engine provides intelligent services by offloading intelligence and optimisation algorithms. Thus, the gateway's decision-making model may choose the best alternative. Resource virtualization-based gateway-based device management facilitates user monitoring and visualisation in the proposed IoT system. The gateway evaluates context-based profiles to enable real-time connection with intelligent services and dynamic application of the appropriate control factor to the physical device using the virtual resource. We propose two smart models to learn characteristics of a user's home environment using deep learning and build inference models for the intelligent service engine to optimise energy usage with the recommended IoT system. Inference methods forecast heater energy usage. Heaters set the environment. The decision-making algorithm also lowers the heater setting based on the two use numbers, reducing energy consumption and producing a user-desired environment.

Investigation of comfort temperature and thermal adaptation for patients and visitors in Malaysian hospitals

The current indoor thermal comfort standards and guidelines for hospital wards in the tropics may be insufficient for maintaining thermal comfort for occupants and ensuring energy efficiency in hospitals. Therefore, field survey assessments of thermal comfort were conducted in three Malaysian hospitals with air conditioning capabilities for patient rooms. This study evaluated existing thermal conditions and thermal comfort preferences of patients and their visitors. A total of 389 responses were collected in hot and humid conditions. Indoor thermal measurements were collected in each hospital and compared to the local guidelines. The lower temperature results compared to the Malaysian standard MS1525 (2014) and the Industry Code of Practice on Indoor Air Quality (2010) by the Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) in Malaysia indicated that specific thermal comfort guidelines were required for hospital wards in Malaysia. The mean comfort operative temperatures were estimated to be 25.3 °C for patients and 25.5 °C for visitors. The relationships between the indoor comfort temperature and running mean outdoor temperature (27.0 − 31.0 °C) in the three hospitals were also determined. These adaptive relationships can serve as a guide for building service engineers and researchers seeking to reduce energy use in hospitals.

IEEE NetSoft 2017 special issue: Softwarization sustaining a hyper‐connected world: En route to 5G

IEEE NetSoft 2017 special issue: Softwarization sustaining a hyper‐connected world: En route to 5G

An Economic, Energy, and Environmental Analysis of PV/Micro-CHP Hybrid Systems: A Case Study of a Tertiary Building

Our present standard of living depends strongly on energy sources, with buildings being a primary focus when it comes to reducing energy consumption due to their large contribution, especially in tertiary buildings. The goal of the present study is to evaluate the performance of two different designs of hybrid systems, composed of natural gas engines and photovoltaic panels. This will be done through simulations in TRNSYS, considering a representative office building with various schedules of operation (8, 12, and 24 h), as well as different climates in Spain. The main contributions of this paper are the evaluations of primary energy-consumption, emissions, and economic analyses for each scenario. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is carried out to observe the influence of energy prices, as well as that of the costs of the micro-CHP engines and PV modules. The results show that the scenario with the conventional system and PV modules is the most profitable one currently. However, if electricity prices are increased in the future or natural gas prices are reduced, the scenario with micro-CHP engines and PV modules will become the most profitable option. Energy service engineers, regulators, and manufacturers are the most interested in these results.

Liquids-Rich Permian Showcased as a Model Basin

This year’s edition of the SPE Liquids-Rich Basin Conference in Midland, Texas, merged topics that have dominated recent industry discussions: technologies centered on big data, interwell communication, and Permian Basin production. Given its location in “one of the hottest shale plays in the world right now,” the September event was “more accessible to those most directly working” in the basin, including committee members, presenters, and attendees, said Amber Voithofer, chair of the conference’s program committee. Presentations involved several big Permian operators, top oilfield service firms, and engineering and technology companies. “There is a real focus in the industry to start doing more with all the data we have been collecting,” Voithofer said. “We have all of this data and really have not utilized it to its full potential.” As a result, further discussion in the coming years will revolve around machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. To address these advancements in an unconventional context, the conference was weighted toward the application of data analytics on local data sets and knowledge gained from modeling on themes such as parent-child well interaction, bashing, and sequencing. Special attention was paid to well spacing and well performance analysis methods. Two presentations that sought to provide simpler answers to complex problems generated much interest. In SPE 191777, Schlumberger “challenged the status quo” on how estimated ultimate recovery is calculated, Voithofer noted. “Instead of fitting a curve through all the historic production data and extending it into the future, the paper proposed we match segments of well production, taking into account changes after well interventions.” In SPE 191783, Apache offered a glimpse into how operators are attempting to manage uncertainties around well spacing. “The Permian is hot, and as companies continue to invest in development out here, I expect we will see more novel processes or technologies coming out of the basin,” Voithofer said, adding that there’s another liquids-rich basin to watch going forward: the Powder River.

A Brief Review on Retail Business Positioning between the United States and Japan

본 연구에서는 월마트와 이온의 입지전략을 중심으로 대형마트의 성장 전략을 알아보고자 하였다. 소매업은 입지산업이라고 할 만큼 입지전략이 중요하다. 선행연구 검토결과에서 경영전략 상 입지가 갖는 비중이 매우 크다는 것을 밝히고 있다. 이러한 점을 토대로 본 연구에 서는 소매입지로써 주목받지 못했던 농촌지역을 개발하여 성장해 온 미국의 월마트와 일본의 이온을 통해 이를 비교/검토하고자 했다. 월마트는 미국남부의 농촌지역으로의 도미넌트 출점을 하였다. 월마트는 지역욕구를 독점하기 위한 저가격 소구전략을 수립하여 미국 최고의 소매기업이 되었다. 일본의 이온도 농촌이나 교외에 백화점형 쇼핑센터를 개발하는 등 독특한 비즈니스 모델을 구축하였다. 양사 모두 자국에서 개발한 경쟁력이 있는 비즈니스 모델을 가지고 해외에 출점하여 소매의 국제화를 추진하였다. 오늘날의 소비시장은 소매업태의 라이프사이클이 짧아지고 있다. 따라서 새로운 업태의 개발과 함께 끊임없는 혁신을 하지 않으면 쇠퇴의 국면을 맞게 될 것이다. 이러한 상황을 전제로 향후의 연구과제로는 다음과 같은 것이 필요하다고 하겠다. 첫 번째, 현재 일본이나 미국과 같이 성숙한 사회에서는 기업마다 독자적인 형태의 점포를 만들어 내는 사례가 많기 때문에 그 결과 통합된 업태로 정의하기가 어려워지고 있다는 점이다. 두 번째, 소매업은 상품판매 서비스업이라고 할 수 있는 만큼 서비스업으로서의 측면도 함께 가지고 있다. 따라서 서비스 혁신을 촉진하여 생산성 향상을 도모하는 것도 필요하기 때문에 서비스업에 제조업의 과학 및 기술을 도입하여 서비스업을 과학적으로 인식하는 서비스과학이나 서비스 공학으로의 관심이 높아지고 있다. 제조업과 소매업의 융합이 새로운 혁신의 모양을 만들어 내는 경우도 있어서 소매업 분야로의 과학적, 공학적 접근에 대한 추이를 지켜볼 필요가 있다.In this study, I approached the growth strategy of large-scale supermarkets focusing on Walmart and Aeon’ s positioning strategy. Retail business is being called as positioning industry and its strategy is important. Based on the contents, I reviewed on previous studies of retail business positioning and examined differences from industrial positioning. Retail business positioning is very important for business management strategy. Furthermore, I examined the Walmrt and Japanese Aeon which has grown and developed its position by developing rural areas that have not been outstanding. Also I reviewed positioning selection and positioning adaptation. Walmart has become the world top retail business company in the United States by developing a business for a low-cost housing goods since dominant release open in southern rural area of United States. Aeon in Japan has developed a unique business model, developing a mall-type shopping center business in rural areas. Both companies has promoted internationalization of retailing by opening overseas markets with competitive business models developed in their countries. Today’ s consumer market is declining life cycle. If it is not going to be innovated with the development of new businesses, it is likely to be declined. Based on this situation, future studies and research are necessary as follows. First, in a mature society such as Japan and the United States, there are many cases that company creates their own type of store. As a result, it is being far away from the integrated type of business. Second, the retail industry can be said as the service industry or the product sales service industry. It has to promote service innovation and improve productivity. Therefore, interest in service science and service engineering are introduced. And scientifical service science or service engineering are becoming popular. There is also the convergence of manufacturing and retailing as a new kind of innovation, so we need to keep our eyes on the scientific and engineering approaches for the retail sector.

Consolidating Service Engineering Ontologies Building Service Ontology from SOA Modeling Language (SoaML)

As a term for characterizing a process of devising a service system, the term ‘service engineering’ is still regarded as an ‘open’ research challenge due to unspecified details and conflicting perspectives. This paper presents consolidated service engineering ontologies in collecting, specifying and defining relationship between components pertinent within the context of service engineering. The ontologies are built by way of literature surveys from the collected conceptual works by collating various concepts into an integrated ontology. Two ontologies are produced: general service ontology and software service ontology. The software-service ontology is drawn from the informatics domain, while the generalized ontology of a service system is built from both a business management and the information system perspective. The produced ontologies are verified by exercising conceptual operationalization of the ontologies in adopting several service orientation features and service system patterns. The proposed ontologies are demonstrated to be sufficient to serve as a basis for a service engineering framework.

Agile Service Engineering in the Industrial Internet of Things

The emerging Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will not only leverage new and potentially disruptive business models but will also change the way software applications will be analyzed and designed. Agility is a need in a systematic service engineering as well as a co-design of requirements and architectural artefacts. Functional and non-functional requirements of IT users (in smart manufacturing mostly from the disciplines of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering) need to be mapped to the capabilities and interaction patterns of emerging IIoT service platforms, not to forget the corresponding information models. The capabilities of such platforms are usually described, structured, and formalized by software architects and software engineers. However, their technical descriptions are far away from the thinking and the thematic terms of end-users. This complicates the transition from requirements analysis to system design, and hence the re-use of existing and the design of future platform capabilities. Current software engineering methodologies do not systematically cover these interlinked and two-sided aspects. The article describes in a comprehensive manner how to close this gap with the help of a service-oriented analysis and design methodology entitled SERVUS (also mentioned in ISO 19119 Annex D) and a corresponding Web-based Platform Engineering Information System (PEIS).

Trace Crawler

The Object Request Broker (ORB) manages the interaction between clients and servers using the Internet InterORB Protocol (IIOP). The ORB trace file comprises of messages, trace points, and wire tracing. These trace files are usually large and at times they can grow to 1-2 GBs. For debugging an ORB problem, the developer must determine whether the problem is in the client or in the server of the distributed application. Typically during debugging process, developer have to switch between source codes and trace logs back and forth multiple times. Often browsing the right source code file, opening it in the IDE and then moving to the line from where the trace is originated. This work proposes a tool which will help developers and service engineers to browse through source code and corresponding trace by providing integrated framework. The Aim of the tool is to build an application to parse and analyse ORB trace files. The application will fetch relevant details for the failing entries, and will perform the preliminary analysis. In this way a lot of time and human effort can be saved. The customers such as defense, military organizations can themselves view relevant details about the failures of their application by this tool, without having to compromise on confidentiality with minimal effort and time.

PMD170 - A RESEARCH ON HOSPITAL BASED-HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT MODELS OF ACQUISITION OF MEDICAL DEVICES IN HOSPITALS: THE CASE OF TURKEY

The purpose of this study was to examine the awareness of the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) methods, assessment methods which are used by the people, involved in the medical device acquisition process in the hospital, which assessment methods are used most and which methods are found most effective in the hospitals. Results will provide information to the policy makers to be able to produce evidence based policies related to Hospital Based-HTA. The research is a cross-sectional field survey in analytical quality. It was carried out in public (24) and private (9) hospitals over 100 beds in Ankara province. The questionnaire was used as a research tool. The questionnaire was carried out to employees (186) who work in the assessment process of acquisition a medical device in these hospitals. Those are from the head physician team, financial service, health care service and biomedical engineering service. About 69% of employees said they did not hear HTA method before. When asked what kind of assessment method they use in the hospitals, by multidisciplinary committee model is 96% in the public sector, 89% in the private sector; by only requested employee 25% in the public sector, 33% in the private sector; by HTA Unit 4% in the public sector and 33% in the private sector. Among Health Technology Assessment Models, multidisciplinary committee model was found the most effective one (75%). As a result of the study, multidisciplinary committee model has become the most effective assessment method both in hospitals and by participants. It is considered that a structured training program on HB-HTA methodology for the multidisciplinary committees members may help to improvement of evidence based decision making process on acquisition of medical devices in the hospitals.

Multi-criteria decision analysis for the assessment of non-clinical hospital services: Methodology and case study

Non-clinical hospital services to support clinical activities, such as the sterilization service and clinical engineering, are an important technology asset in healthcare, and require constant improvement aimed to reduce economic burden and increase quality. The selection of the most effective healthcare service to adopt in a healthcare facility is a multi-criteria decision problem that classical Health Technology Assessment, being mostly focused on medicines, vaccines and medical devices, cannot easily address.Here we present a methodology based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis allowing a full assessment of non-clinical hospital services and supporting the selection of the most suitable solution in a certain environment.The methodology involves two different panels of experts: the first one includes international professionals and is aimed at selecting the assessment criteria that are relevant to the target service; the second one is a local panel whose members know the needs and peculiarities of the specific healthcare facility. This approach allows the final decision makers to take into account changes and constraints of their environment, but examining criteria that are internationally recognized as of interest. The proposed methodology, tested in a real context of an Italian Local Health Authority, is versatile and can be applied in any context, even out of the healthcare domain, especially if data in the literature are not sufficient to allow comparisons with similar services in different settings.