[en] Businesses increasingly offer their services electronically via the Web. Take for example an Internet Service Provider. An ISP offers a variety of services, including raw bandwidth, IP connectivity, and Domain Name resolution. Although in some cases
a single service already satisfies a customer need, in many situations a customer need is so complex that a bundle of services
is needed to satisfy the need, as with the ISP example. In principle, each service in a bundle can be provisioned by a different
supplier. This paper proposes an ontology, e3service , that can be used to formally capture customer needs, services, and multisupplier service bundles of these. In addition, this paper contributes a process called PCM2
to reason with the ontology. First,
a customer need is identified for which desired consequences are elicited. Then, the desired set of consequences is matched
with consequences associated with services. The matching process results in a service bundle, satisfying the customer need,
containing services that each can be provided by different suppliers. PCM2
is inspired by a family of formal reasoning methods
called Propose-Critique-Modify (PCM). However, whereas PCM methods emphasize solution generation from a given set of
requirements, our reasoning process treats the space of requirements as a first class citizen. Hence PCM2
: the requirements
space and solution space are equally important. How the reasoning and matching process practically works, is illustrated by an
industry strength case study in the healthcare domain.
Research center :
VU University, CRP Henri Tudor, University of Luxembourg
Disciplines :
Computer science
Author, co-author :
De Kinderen, Sybren ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)
de Leenheer, Pieter; VU University Amsterdam > Business informatics
Gordijn, Jaap; VU University Amsterdam > Business Informatics
Akkermans, Hans; VU University Amsterdam > Business informatics
Meiland, Franka; EMGO institute, VU medical centre > psychiatry
Droes, Rose-Marie; EMGO institute, VU medical centre > psychiatry
Language :
English
Title :
e3-service: an ontology for needs-driven real-world service bundling in a multi-supplier setting