A Formal Model of Human Interactions for Service Ecosystem Design

In this digital era, the natures of services are becoming increasingly complex and diverse due to the convergences between the existing human-centered services and other supportive device services, or interactions between heterogeneous services. Expecting this trend is to be accelerated more, new scientific and engineered approaches to the service design are needed more than ever. In this context, a service designed conceptually and abstractly has significant limitations that keep the customers’ satisfaction from advancing above a certain level. Hence, in an initial service design phase, a service delivery process can be expressed quantitatively through a systematic analysis of its natures and the goals. In this paper, a human-centered complex service system is newly defined as service ecosystem. This study proposes a method for designing service processes as a Discrete Event System (DES) in formal ways by utilizing the concepts of affordance, preference, and a Affordance-based Finite State Automata (FSA) modeling methodology. The proposed design method suggests a model framework that focuses on service actions that reflects related properties of customers, employees, and environment entities and their interactions quantitatively. The formally expressed relations between properties of service entities such as customer, employee, and service environment provide guidelines for service designers in a more scientific way than traditional ones. In addition, it is expected that it will enable to add computational to the human-centered service system design and control and develop effective reusable controllers for complex service deliveries as well.