Parallel Services

Since the 1950s, services have gradually become an indispensable part of people’s life. The global service industry has been growing rapidly, and the proportion of service output in the national economic structure of each country has been increasing and gradually becoming the leading industry in many countries. In terms of the service industry scenes, it encompasses personal, business, government, and many other fields. In recent years, servitization or product-service systems has been an important trend in service area. Many representative companies have shown “parallel” trends in service innovation, operation, and management. However, in general, with the rising customer demand and involvement, social progress, and technology development, the operation and management of services system become more and more complex. Facing such complex systems, we propose a new management paradigm and framework named parallel services, based on our ACP-based parallel intelligence, which has been successful in several fields. It is expected to bring new vitality to the current management of complex services systems, even in the future with more cutting-edge technologies and scenarios.

In the digital age, services have developed with various new scenarios and opportunities. The Internet of Things, 5G, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and many other new technologies have not only improved the quality, professionalism, and diversity of services, but also the resilience of the service industry in response to major emergency events. But at the same time, the complexity of service systems is increasing. The complexity is reflected in the nature of services, the involvement of people, the dynamics and evolution of service systems, as well as the emerging functions from interactions of multiple stakeholders. Moreover, the application of new technologies is a double-edged sword. The readiness of technology, concerns with data generated, reliability of the technology application, adaptability of service providers, and potential resistance of customers to the new technology are all potential issues that arise from the technology. In summary, encountering these challenges and the complex systems with features of irreducibly and unpredictability triggered us to develop a parallel service method with artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution.

We introduce “AlphaGo thesis” as an introduction to the chapter. Based on Jaspers’ concept of the “Axial Age” and Karl Popper’s idea of 3 parallel interacting worlds, we propose that today’s society needs to enter the Third Axial Age based on the “new IT” of intelligent technology, with an artificial world as the main focus. In order to enter the Third Axial Age and fill the “cognitive gap,” parallel services can serve as a bridge between the physical and mental worlds. The world of the future will be a “6S” society with “true DAO” and “6I.”

In this section, we present the definition and content of parallel services. And we establish the framework to describe it. Parallel services include real services systems, artificial services systems, environments, and consumers. The artificial services system learns from the real services system and then provides decision support to the real services system. We will develop the details of how to build an artificial services system in Chap. 5.

In this chapter, we introduce the main methodology to supporting parallel services, including the ACP approach, artificial services system design, design thinking, and systems engineering.

In this chapter, we introduce the main technologies that underpin parallel services, including decentralized technology, multi-agent simulation, and data fusion techniques.

As a framework targets on handling the complexity of service systems, parallel services have been successfully applied in many research area, including transportation (Wang (IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst 11(3):630–638, 2010)), rail management (Lyu et al. (IEEE Intell Syst 29(4):102–104, 2014)), and healthcare (Wang et al. (IEEE Trans Comput Soc Syst, 2022)). Many studies have shown the potentials of parallel services to improve the service quality effectively (Zhang et al. (Intell Transport Syst 15:589–596, 2014)). In this part, we demonstrate the potentials and advantages of the parallel services framework via four classic applications. In Sect. 7.1, we apply our framework to urban traffic service systems, i.e., Parallel transportation Management Systems. The results demonstrated that parallel traffic service systems can greatly improve the efficiency of the system. Then, in Sect. 7.2, we propose a parallel healthcare service system for the design and innovation of an online healthcare platform. Healthcare services emphasize more on the “social” space and then the human-centered design. Hence, we introduce a “semiparallel services” framework in this case. Through agent-based simulation, we analyze the advantages of parallel services via a demonstration application. In addition, we also discuss the application of parallel services framework in retailing services in Sect. 7.3. Finally, in Sect. 7.4, we propose a parallel services framework for express delivery.

In this chapter, we clarified the definition and classification of digital twins through literature review. Finally, the relationship between digital twins and our new concept of “Parallel Services” is given.

Parallel services metaverses, from our perspective, refer to metaverses that could be viewed as service systems, the essence of which is parallel services systems. In this chapter, after the basic introduction of metaverses, we first discuss the scientific nature of metaverses, CPSS, from the perspective of parallel philosophy. Next, we point out that in the service domain, parallel services systems could serve as the essence of parallel services metaverses and provide methodological support. Finally, we introduce DAOs and related technologies as the key to the development of metaverses at present.