SERVICE SYSTEMS PERFORMANCE ONTOLOGY

Service systems are designed with the intention of providing service to customers. Also known as a value co-creation system, a service system is a configuration of technology and organizational networks. This paper describes the development of a performance ontology for service systems. The core of the performance ontology describes the four primitives in service systems - customers, resources, service and protocols, and the semantic relations among them. The ontology provides a framework for integrating the quantitative performance evaluation of service systems specified as queuing networks or as stochastic Petri nets. The goal of the domain ontology is to eliminate the conceptual and terminological confusion among the members of a virtual community of performance analysts and designers.