Energy services: A case study in real-world service configuration

Abstract

Current eCommerce is still mainly characterized by the trading of commodity goods. Many industries offer complex compositions of goods based on customers' specifications. This is facilitated by a component-based description of goods, supported by a variety of product classification schemes, e.g., UNSPSC and eCl@ss. These focus on physical goods - wrongly referred to as products - rather than on services. Services are intangible products, for instance insurances, transportation, network connectivity, events hosting, entertainment or energy supply. Due to major differences between goods and services, product classification schemes cannot support automated service scenarios, such as a customer who wishes to define and buy a set of independent services, possibly supplied by multiple suppliers, via one website. To enable such eCommerce scenarios for services, a service ontology is required that supports a component-based structure of services. Defining a set of services is then reduced to a configuration task, as studied in the knowledge management literature. In this paper we use a case study from the Norwegian energy sector to describe how a component-based ontological description of services facilitates the automated design of a set of services, a so called service bundle. © Springer-Verlag 2004.