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Product service systems (PSS), which generate higher value by integrating physical products and services, have attracted much attention in the manufacturing industry. To design a PSS, initiating companies need to explore various PSS options at the conceptual design stage. However, our PSS design workshops have revealed that traditional product-selling manufacturers rarely include PSS options because a PSS, which includes many service elements, is far from their traditional business. This study proposes a task management framework that enables manufacturers to develop various PSS options from their product-selling business. The proposed framework provides designers with viewpoints and checklists for a PSS design. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated through an example case.

This paper proposes steps of conceptual service design by assimilation of service modeling methods into conventional design practices of ICT systems integrators. The service models are simplified into four forms: persona-scenario, requirement-function-resource tree, Actors’ Map, and service blueprint. The input and output data of each model are formalized with design principles, enabling data chain between the models. The relationships between the data of design deliverables, such as plan, functional design, and detailed design documents, are also defined clearly in accordance with their design procedures. As the results, roles for tasks are clarified, and tasks and deliverables are systematized into seven design steps. The steps help to change the mindset of system integrators from product-oriented to service-oriented and assist servitize their business.

This paper presents disciplines for designing actor network of Product-Service Systems by visualizing state changes in design process and indicating tasks for state transitions. While IT vendors co-design new services with their clients, sporadic requirements and constraints may leave target users and business partners unsettled in the conceptual IT service system. IT vendors design a hypothetic service system and check it continuously through ad hoc workshops. They gradually identify such actors from possible groups of people, though this design procedure is still improvisational. A set of states and tasks is described indicating what PSS designers need to do next with possible actors, instilling correct disciplines for establishing relationships between them.

A fundamental demand for IT service providers is to obtain design skills for non-functional requirements (NFRs) of a target IT enabled service system. The design task should identify a number of NFR determinants, such as the architecture of the IT infrastructure, the operational procedure, and the human resources for service delivery. The satisfaction of NFRs has not been validated after implementation or deployment of the service, which causes extensive redesign work. Thus, a modeling method to bridge NFR and IT service design for reducing such risks is introduced, and an NFR evaluation model is provided. Consequently, IT service designers can validate NFRs in the early development phase.

Currently, the importance of services is widely accepted in various industries. Given this background, fundamental research on service engineering is carried out quite actively. Service engineering seeks to provide design methodology for services from an engineering perspective. In product and service design, designers are generally forced to spend a lot of redesign works if design changes occur at a late stage of the design process. Thus, it is important for designers to validate design solutions in the early stage(s) of the design process by using simulation methods. However, simulation models in the existing methods are built with quantitative information. In the early stages of the service design process, most of the information about a design solution is still not defined; therefore, it is difficult to obtain sufficient quantitative information. For obtaining such quantitative information, service providers need to offer a designed service to their customers as a trial, which impose much effort for building quantitative simulation models. In order to reduce such risks, this research applies a qualitative simulation method, which can be used to analyze the behavior of systems with fuzzy qualitative information. In this paper, we propose a method to build a qualitative simulation model with the design information available at the early stage(s) of the service design process. This method would enable designers to evaluate a design solution in the early stage of a service design process and would increases quality of the service design., サービス学会主催 The 3rd International Conference on Serviceology (ICServ 2015) July 7-9, 2015 in San Jose, CA, USA.

When we evaluate performance of a virtualized system, we should consider two aspects, performance interference and the number of virtual machine (VM) combinations. Performance interference is caused by sharing physical resources among VMs and virtual machine monitor (VMM) scheduling. We should precisely incorporate these effects into performance evaluation. We also need to evaluate many VM combinations to find the optimal consolidation of servers, therefore, it is important we apply an efficient evaluation method to reduce evaluation time. We propose a layered performance model to address these aspects. We regard a virtualized system as a combination of two layers: one consisting of VMs and the other consisting of VMM and physical resources. We construct a performance model for each layer. We apply the white-box approach to the VM layer model and the black-box approach to the VMM/physical resource layer model. The white-box model is flexible for representing many VM combinations and the black-box model incorporates performance interference. By allocating each aspect to each model, our proposed model evaluates performance precisely and efficiently. We discuss the effectiveness of our proposed model with a case study of storage I/O contention.