Service design knowledge management based on input-output function representation

Abstract

In service Engineering, a basic structure of a service that satisfies customer requirements is designed through phases ot "development of functional structures" and "embodiment of functions." In the phase of embodiment, it is important, for the purpose of enhancing the quality of a design solution, to acquire a lot of knowledge from other service cases. In Service Engineering, service functions are represented by "verb-noun approach" which may leads a different expression of the same functions, and this makes exploring entities that realize a function difficult. In this paper, to describe service functions with a unified representation, the "input-output approach" of functional modeling is introduced in service design, and service design knowledge base is constructed based on the input-output functions. The result of the verification shows that the proposed method is useful to unify service function representation and effective to manage service design knowledge in the embodiment phase.