Service Systems Modeling: Concepts, Formalized Meta-Model and Technical Concretion

Abstract

Over the past years service science has changed. Nowadays the object of research is highly professionalized complex service systems. For this area of research, service systems modeling provides concepts and formalized meta-models for describing service systems in a precise way. In this paper different aspects of service systems modeling are presented: (a) the specification of singular service components (component model), (b) the specification of the component’s resources (resource model), (c) the definition of interdependencies of service components relevant for configuration (product model) and (d) the temporal dependencies between service components necessary for defining process instances (process model). This paper offers a modeling-relevant definition of service systems, the theoretical foundation of the meta-model (based on a wide literature research) as well as the concepts and terms, necessary for modeling service systems. Finally, the advantages and limitations of service system modeling are discussed.