Page 264 - Mechatronics for Safety, Security and Dependability in a New Era

Ch50-I044963.fm Page 248 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:05 PM
Ch50-I044963.fm
248
248 Page 248 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:05 PM

Figure 1: The Conceptual Scheme of Service CAD
proposed (Shimomura (2002)). Based on these, this paper aims at proposing a "service CAD," a
computerized tool to support service design, which provides designers with a design environment
equipped with knowledge about existing services.

The rest of the paper consists of the following sections. Section 2 proposes the concepts of a service
CAD. Section 3 reviews the service modeling method which has been already proposed. Section 4
describes the specifications of a prototype service CAD, and its implementation with an example
service.

SERVICE DESIGN AND A SERVICE CAD
In service engineering, service is defined as an action that a provider performs, through which a
receiver changes into another state the receiver desires. An analysis of existing designs of services
revealed that most of the service designs can be classified into the following three patterns
(Shimomura (2002)):

(1) (Re-)design of a new service by enhancing components of and improving existing services,
(2) application of existing service to a different field, and
(3) creative new design.

For the first two classes of service design, the success or failure, the quality, and the efficiency of
service design depend to a great extent on the knowledge about service design and existing service
cases. However, systematized knowledge about service design hardly exists, while in contrast in
mechanical design existing design knowledge can be stored in a reusable form.
Regarding the first pattern of service design, we could observe at least the following three operation
patterns (Shimomura (2002)):
(1-1) Substitution of components with something else,
(1-2) removing a part of service, and
(1-3) combination of different existing services.

Pattern (1-1) is an operation to substitute a component of an existing service with another one.
Patterns (1-1) and (1-2) are operations to build a new service by changing and modifying the whole or
a partial structure of the target service, while Pattern (1-3) comes up with a new combination of
services.