Page 265 - Mechatronics for Safety, Security and Dependability in a New Era

Ch50-I044963.fm Page 249 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:05 PM
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Page 249
Ch50-I044963.fm
4:05 PM
249
249
File Edit
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Linen ompany Hotel
\ / Relied ScopeModel.
T \ / cui'tomer Hotel Service
change ScopeMoOel
/
show ScopeModel
( & ) edit RSPs
edit Considerations
Clean ng company Tenant
Hotel
'1
)
Customer

Figure 2: A Screenshot of a Flow Model for a Hotel

Based on the above-mentioned analysis, we have proposed the concepts of service CAD (Computer
Aided Design) (Shimomura (2002)) to support engineers in designing services. The service CAD
serves as an environment to develop a service by providing the knowledge about existing service
cases and various operation rules stored in its database. Figure 1 shows the conceptual scheme of the
service CAD, which consists of the followings.

(1) Service case base: A database of existing service cases.
(2) Design rule base: A database of operation rules for service design.
(3) Reasoning engines: Reasoning engines reason about various properties of service such as
similarity. A pluggable mechanism is employed so that a necessaiy reasoning engine is selected based
on the designer's request.
(4) Service evaluator: An evaluation module to evaluate a service design solution.
(5) Service design process organizer: A module to support service design processes based on a
specific design methodology by means of calling other components etc.

THE EMPLOYED SERVICE MODEL
In order to develop the service CAD, it is necessary to model a service in a form that can be
represented in computer software. A service consists of the following components based on the
definition of the service in Section 2 (Shimomura (2002)).

(1) Provider: provides the service.
(2) Receiver: receives the service.
(3) Contents: cause the receiver's state change directly when provided by the provider through the
service channel.
(4) Channel: what contributes to the receiver's state change indirectly by transmitting, supplying or
amplifying the service contents.

In addition, a Receiver State Parameter (RSP) is introduced to represent a receiver's state. The
changes of RSPs as a whole represent the receiver's state changes caused when a service is provided.