Innovation in Large Service Systems for a Sustainable Planet

International Working Group

This working group (non-profit) will ask a fundamental question: What is needed to design reliable and manageable large service systems? Examples of large service systems include global supply-chains of services (greater than 20,000 providers), massively large environmental sensor-based service systems (with millions of sensors), large road traffic systems, remote home monitoring systems for healthcare, mobile services, RFID systems for manufacturing lines, call-centers, and global enterprises with trillions of data records. All of these systems have many things in common, i.e., they distribute intelligence across multiple entities, scale to millions of entities, hard to manage centrally, and enable services localized and customized to the needs of the end users. Recent statistics have shown that large service systems are unreliable (e.g. downtime risk, maintenance risk), and the designs are known to be suboptimal as compromises have been made on scalability and sustainability, partially due to cost constraints and lack of rigorous methods. This working-group will keep a focus on real world case-studies and examine the applicability of principles from nature, markets, economics and financial models to design large service systems. The working group will bring together enthusiastic participants from business and academia willing to engage in an open discussion on design and challenges in large service systems. The output of this working-group will enable new research on service design principles, open standards, best practices and technology recommendations.

There are a number of recent developments that make such a working-group timely:

• Low cost computing available as services online (e.g clouds) enabling simulation and testing of new business models, service systems and processes possible.
• Real-time data from sensor networks, body sensors, RFID tags, asset monitoring devices etc – demand novel ways of exploiting this wealth of data.
• Service-oriented architecture allowing standardised Web services for enabling businesses to collaborate and reduce operational costs for product delivery.
• Capability to perform deep monitoring of millions of activities of business networks across supply and demand chains.

The working group intends to attack the grand challenges head-on by combining expertise from design, engineering, computer science, social and behavioural sciences and operations research. It intends a focused effort using real-world case-studies that illustrate the interaction between technology, business processes, and human factors.

Open research topics for the working-group

• Formal knowledge models facilitating design of services
  • Formal definition of services that encompass remote sensors, IT, labor, social & business
  • Definition of service units, taxonomies, behaviours, decomposition and composition
• Nature, bio and market inspired modelling and simulation of service systems delivery
  • Sense and respond: large data collection, sensor system models, (RFID, sensors, etc), business process simulation and monitoring
  • Simulation to include human factors, technology, economic factors in service analysis
• Optimization and reliability models for service systems
  • Integrating of data acquisition/extraction and optimization techniques in enterprises
  • Establishing knowledge models for service designs of large systems
  • Enabling reliable design methods using information and intelligence

Primary Steering Group Members

• 360Fresh, Inc, Palo Alto (Dr. J. Sairamesh) -Founding member
• Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley (Prof. Martin Griss, Director) – Founding Member
• Stanford University, Palo Alto (Prof. Margret Bjarnsdottir*, Stanford Business School)
• Columbia University, New York (Prof. Yechiam Yemini)
• UC Berkeley (Prof. Max Shen, Director, Service Lab and R. Nemana, Director, CITRIS)
• Nokia Research, Palo Alto (Dr. Umesh)
• SAP Research, Palo Alto (Dr. Y. Karabulut*)
• IBM Research, Almaden (TBD)
• HP Research, Palo Alto and UK (TBD)
• CA, New York (TBD)
• IDEO, Palo Alto (TBD)
• Tilburg University & CERISS, Netherlands (Prof. Mike Papazoglou & Prof. W.J.V. D. Heuvel)
• University of Crete, Greece (Prof. Christos Nikolaou)

References

1. “Service Research Workshop,” Brussels, February, 2006, Workshop Organizers: J. Sairamesh, S. Feldman and R. Dum.
2. “Convergence of Business and Social Networks,” Brussels, May, 2006. Workshop Organizers: J. Sairamesh and R. Dum
3. “NESSI Service Science Working Group, Brussels,” February, 2006-present
4. “Frontiers of Service Innovation Conference,” San Francisco, 2007.
5. IBM Systems Journal, Special Issue on Service Science, 2008.

For more information, please contact Martin Griss, 650-335-2805