Complex Service Systems Modeling and Simulation

Service is value cocreation. Value can be defined as change that results in an improvement. Value cocreation is change that people prefer and realize by communicating, planning or interacting. Service science aims to account for value-cocreation between entities as they interact. More precisely, entities are configurations of resources (such as people, businesses, hospitals, universities, nations, on-line communities and more). These entities come in primarily four categories - people, organizations, shared information and technology - and can be combined and composed in many ways. Collections of entities form changing and dynamic systems over time with the goal of value cocreation.

The service system is the basic unit of analysis for service science, which is the study of complex arrangements of resources that interact with other complex arrangements of resources to cocreate value. But how can we begin to study and understand this sort of complex, dynamic system? Simply put, by modeling and simulating them. There is just no other way to start to get our minds around the richness and subtlety of real-world service systems.

We have a number of projects focused on various types of service system modeling and simulation. In each of these, we are hoping to learn something about how service systems work - how entities interact to create value together - by modeling or simulating their activities and their data over time and with extraordinary detail.