Serviceology for Smart Service System

This paper proposes a new service scheme in the industrial automation service classification. It clearly categorizes and orders the seven types of industrial automation service from the view point of customer value. This service class depends on some previous work by GAMBICA and ZVEI, and it is modified and newly created to fit the Japanese automation industry. The proposed service scheme in this paper could bridge the gap of service value understanding between customers and service providers and enable service innovation by smoother and wider outsourcing of traditional plant operation and field maintenance.

In past research, we developed a model of service ecosystems involving customers, suppliers, and their communities. The model was constructed using general service loops constituted by the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle and was used to describe service ecosystems. The goal of our research series is to construct a design methodology for service ecosystems. To this end, we need to classify service ecosystems and design a new service ecosystem. Since interactive designs are effective for a loop that indicates adaptive services in a model, we classify service ecosystems from the perspective of interactive design. We devised a new interactive design support system as a job-hunting support service. This system helps users formulate job-hunting plans.

For the design of public services, it is important to clarify service customers. For this purpose, various methods of customer modeling were proposed. Before constructing customer models, it is required to group customers and to characterize each customer group. However, the customer grouping based on some statistical barometers (e.g. age, sex, and job categories) may not reflect actual customer requirements for the service. This paper aims to propose a method for supporting customer grouping and characterizing without such statistical barometers. Finally, the proposed method is applied to an urban development case to demonstrate the effectiveness.

This paper proposes a method to design emotion-based service processes by decomposing highly abstract emotions into detailed emotions. First, we propose an Emotion Hierarchy Diagram (EHD) to decompose abstract emotions into detailed emotions and organize them for identifying and designing specific service processes. The identification steps for creating EHDs are listed. Further, we propose how to use the EHD for deriving service elements. Further, this study verifies whether the proposed EHD can derive service elements for high-quality emotions. We examine where individual differences appear in the EHD, and we find that these differences appear in the axes. Additionally, using statistical tests, we verify whether the service elements for high quality were listed when the EHDs are drawn in both cases, i.e., when the axes were fixed and when they were not.

Some recent discussions in the service science community have been around the need for research on and innovation of human-centered service systems (HCSS) from a multiple discipline perspective. HCSS are complex because of the involvement of people, multiple stakeholders with usually incommensurate value systems spanning networks of resources. Designers of such systems have to draw knowledge and connections from service science, system thinking, design thinking, business, and engineering. In this research, we build an underpinning of the system thinking aspect of service design based on Churchman’s The Design of Inquiring Systems and Swanson’s Churchman’s Theory of Design Integrity as an important aspect of the education of service designers. This will form the philosophical foundation of a creed or set of beliefs and aims that will guide the service designer’s actions. Of particular relevance to service system design is Swanson’s interpretation of Churchman’s work to propose a Theory of Design Integrity, i.e., designing the wholeness, soundness, and virtue of a system. A system professional can design such a system with precepts based on Churchman’s necessary conditions to conceive a system S: it is teleological; it has a measure of performance, a client whose interests (value) are served, teleological components, an environment, a decision maker of resources, and a designer with good intentions to maximize the system’s value to the client; and it is stable. Even though Churchman was not specifically referring to service systems, we see that his ideas are as fresh today as then in applying the precepts to value cocreation scenarios. The Theory of Design Integrity also explicitly offers a virtue component that is lacking in the current service design literature. We feel that this should be an essential part of a service designer’s creed in today’s climate of privacy and security concerns. Swanson also introduced the role of a social witness as an observer who evaluates the system’s design integrity by maintaining a critical and responsible stance not separable from the system. We will illustrate the applicability of the Creed for Service Designers with service system scenarios and describe how it could be incorporated into service design education.

The Japanese government has initiatives on promoting tourism. To fulfill various needs of tourists from many countries, sightseeing tours need to have large variations. This demands productivity improvement. Among others, determination of a sequence among tourist attractions is challenging due to its contextual feature. This paper proposes a design support method for service sequences. Network-structured models are employed to visualize the relationships among tourist attractions in three aspects: place, time, and content. Tour designs are evaluated using a simulation that incorporates multiple stakeholders. The usefulness of the proposed method is discussed via a case study with a prototype system.

This paper proposes a data structure definition of the tourism resources that will help tour designers determine tourists’ fundamental needs based on their requests and design their tours more efficiently. This study analyzes tour services and divides the information useful in proposing services, based on tourists’ requests, into three types: geographical, time, and meaning information. This paper employs those three types of information to define two indexes for use in proposing services that match customer requests.

This paper describes a novel science education program called “localized science education program” that covers topics of a local area, such as its natural wonders, and involves community residents to cultivate an intergenerational community. The science education program has three features: (1) the ability to learn collaboratively is fostered, (2) the programs and educational materials are prepared in the target local area, and (3) the children and adults of the community experience the programs together. An application example of this was implemented in the target local area for 1 year. It is considered that its efficacy for cultivating an intergenerational community.

Sustainability is a service that should be produced and delivered in any process that generates tangible or intangible values and that should be incorporated into each phase of the value chain. Moreover, sustainability should also be an essential part of value co-creation, the process of which eventually recruits the customer as a provider of sustainability to current and future generations. In so doing, the value co-creation process and subsequent propagation of sustainability can mimic the cyclic and evolutionary aspects of nature.

A dynamic and well-structured service system is needed for solving the food safety and food security problems in Bangladesh. Moreover, food adulteration has maximized the severity of these problems. Agricultural products are mostly adulterated, and there is a significant scarcity of these products in urban markets. Women farmers in the agricultural sector can deliver better services to consumers if opportunities can be created for them within the specialized service system. This paper proposes an innovative service model based on urban schools. The major focus of this service system is not only creation of opportunities for women farmers to become empowered but also to reduce food safety and adulteration issues and provide nutritional benefit to children in urban areas of Bangladesh.

More and more companies are applying service design approaches to develop services and products. Not every project, however, has achieved its goals. In many cases, difficulties arise from organizational issues such as organization structure and evaluation system. In this research, we held workshops where success and failure factors of service design projects in organization are presented. By analyzing the results, we construct a model that explains the “difficulties of deploying the service design approach in organization.” On the basis of the model, this paper discusses the challenges to the deployment of the service design approach in organizations.

This paper generalizes processes for various services and defines a generalized service process (GSP). The first half presents GSP in two processes: one on the customer side and the other on the provider side, expressed by context-free grammar with generic terms. The second half proposes a GSP-based system and its applications. A procedure is outlined for specializing GSP by reducing the production rules of GSP. Examples of specialization representing individual service processes are also illustrated. Finally, the effectiveness of the methodology is discussed in terms of how it helps us better understand individual services and share and reuse best practices and knowledge.

The concept of a new public transportation system, Smart Access Vehicle System (SAVS), for mobility as a service (MaaS) is introduced.SAVS project is a typical example of the practice in serviceology in the sense that new service emerges in a design-service-analysis loop. Mobility itself is not the goal – mobility is a service, or service platform, on which other services are provided. Mobility enhances activities of people and thus increases the value of other services.We conducted the field tests of SAVS three times in Hakodate and achieved the world’s first full automatic management of real-time multiple demand-responsive transportation. The next step is to enhance its usability and utility. We hope it is possible with the help of ambient intelligence (AmI).Since SAVS works in outdoor environment citywide, we believe many new and interesting research issues arise from AmI point of view. It will be a city version of intelligent rooms. At the same time, SAVs themselves act as probe cars to collect information about traffic situation.In the paper, we first briefly describe SAVS and its implementation done so far. We then address the design concept of MaaS in the light of AmI. Combining information and mobility significantly increases the quality of urban life. We present the concept of citywide realization of AmI.

Customer experience that is co-created by both sides of the service provider and customer becomes a main element toward competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to examine the customer experience toward two major retail types: the Vietnamese traditional retail format (wet market) and modern retail sector (supermarket). The data mentioned throughout this paper were obtained by a survey, and the results indicate that while the strengths of supermarkets are brought by the facility, safety, and hygiene products, the strength of the wet market is sustained by aspects such as freshness, relationship, and context. The results show that interpersonal relationships are the essential component that makes the way in which the wet market can maintain its sustainability. The results pave the way for recommendations of some policies.

This study focuses on improving the productivity of restaurant business. The productivity of restaurant business in Japan is lower than other service industries because the approach to improve the productivity has depended on experience and intuition by human workers in the service field. This study tries to adopt engineering/science approaches to staff shift scheduling in restaurant business; combinatorial auction is applied. Combinatorial auction-based staff scheduling is a negotiation-based approach between workers and a manager to reach an agreement in the multi-objective optimization problem; workers want to work as much as they can. On the other hand, the manager tries to reduce the number of workers if the service level can be kept with high enough to fulfil the customer’s requirements. Resulting from the negotiation, the proposed method tries to find the staff shift schedule to realize maximization of service satisfaction composed by customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and manager satisfaction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed using the results of computer experiments using real data obtained from the Japanese cuisine restaurant.

This study was conducted to improve both management and employee satisfaction (ES) at multiproduct Japanese cuisine restaurants. Conventionally, restaurant industry research has emphasized the improvement of management satisfaction. However, restaurants must improve employee satisfaction because it deeply affects labor productivity and food quality. For this study, the kitchen layout was remodelled, a cell production system was introduced to a multiproduct Japanese cuisine restaurant, and the kitchen was designed using a kitchen simulator to enhance cooking time and to improve the working environment of staff members. Salary and promotion systems were changed to encourage staff members to adopt the cell production system. Cooking times were measured (existing layout, immediately after remodel, and 2 months after remodel) as KPI to confirm the efficacy of the redesigned kitchen. Questionnaires were administered to confirm employee satisfaction (as same times as measuring cooking speed). Results show that (1) remodelling of the kitchen layout using a kitchen simulator is useful to enhance the food preparation rate of a multiproduct Japanese cuisine restaurant, (2) the rate worsens immediately after remodelling because staff members are not accustomed with new kitchen layout, and (3) employees estimate that the remodelled kitchen layout is better than the existing kitchen and that the new salary system is reasonable for them, but they do not want to advance their skills because of their age and difficulty (some are already multiskilled workers).

This paper presents first guidelines for the cultural adaptation and efficient global provision of services. For this purpose, it elaborates on how to consider culture-specific components of a service on the basis of systematic service modularization. This is illustrated by the example of an IT-mediated learning service, which is usually perceived differently in diverse cultures. To this end, a process model is described based on culture theory and systematic modularization in order to identify culture-specific and culture-independent components of a learning service for its consideration within global service provision. This contribution to practice is complemented by the theoretical contribution of the inclusion of culture-theoretical components into service modularization.

Bed care skills are highly demanded in an elderly society. Therefore, intelligent training service begins to appear for automatically transferring a skill. In this paper, we proposed a bed care activity analysis framework containing three entities: nurse, patient, and environment. Nurse activity was represented by actions with patient or environment. These interactions were recognized by body part gesture and represented by agent-motion-target type in linguistics. The bed care task-patient repositioning carried out in motion capture system was analyzed by the proposed framework and represented by linguistic description. Thus, activity was automatically observed in the training service.

The prime objective of this paper is to propose an evolving service system for cocreation of value in microfinance. Close monitoring and the role of the customer service assistant (CSA) are the key components of this evolving service system. A semi-structured interview strategy was used to elucidate the evolving service system. We conducted 25 interviews with employees of BRAC’s microfinance program, Bangladesh, and its borrowers. The results show that CSA particularly plays a key role in the evolving service system to provide higher financial literacy than before through their professional activities including pre-disbursement orientations and giving 4 days of training to borrowers.

Many types of enterprises have to handle a variety of criteria of consumers in accordance with the business expansion in the global and service economy. How do we extract consumers’ service processes considering their criteria for service evaluation by using simple survey methods? We develop an ad hoc questionnaire model which is to involve consumers in making the questionnaire linked their service processes in prepurchase stage, and after their service encounter, they modify/complete it. We present six interpretations based on this concept through our web questionnaire survey for restaurants in Japan. This ad hoc questionnaire model can propose the opportunity to understand consumers’ context more deeply.

Retailers need to understand customer preferences precisely in order to improve customer satisfaction. This research aims to correct retailers’ conceptual misunderstandings of preference based on actual purchase behavior. To this end, a novel conceptual preference model is introduced. This model can be defined by persons on the basis of their own knowledge and is updated utilizing actual data of purchase behavior. Typical patterns of misunderstanding are classified into three types: incorrect relationship, weak relationship, and unexpected relationship. A novel method has been developed for evaluating the model to extract these patterns of misunderstanding and validated by conducting an experiment comprised of a cafeteria analysis. The conceptual model includes 11 preference types defined on the basis of retailers’ knowledge and was evaluated utilizing ID-POS data. Results showed that the three patterns of misunderstanding could successfully be extracted. It was confirmed that this method is helpful for retailers to understand the appropriate preference model and that a model built by using the proposed method can help improve the business processes in a retail setting.

A contact person has attempted to achieve a higher level of customer satisfaction by providing superior services. However, do higher-quality services always lead to higher customer satisfaction? The model developed by social psychologists, Greenberg and Westcott, Indebtedness as a mediator of reactions to aid. In: Fisher JD, Nadler A, DePaulo BM (eds) New directions in helping, volume 1: recipient reaction and aid. Academic Press, New York, pp 85–112, 1983, connotes that customers are likely to feel negative affect toward a contact person via indebtedness and/or other mediators, but this model has remained unexamined empirically. This study integrates these mediators into five factors and empirically tests the effects of customer benefit on satisfaction mediated by five factors and indebtedness. The results of SEM show that indebtedness caused by customer benefit decreases satisfaction.

“Omotenashi” is basically the Japanese term, which refers to the marking of a special occasion or the displaying to a person or persons their importance to you. Omotenashi can include birthdays, retirement parties, the giving of special gifts, and so on. In this study, the authors explore success factors in “omotenashi consumption (OC)” where consumers used restaurants. Using the critical incident technique, the data involving 1080 cases (incidents) was collected from the perspective of the omotenashi organizer (host). The authors developed a framework to analyze OC based on service encounters and customer encounters. “Customer encounter” refers to the interaction between the host(s) and guest(s). Finally, based on the findings of our study on OC in relation to restaurants, the importance of analyzing consumer-to-consumer interactions during the service consumption is discussed.

Nurturing relationships with your customers is a crucial part of developing a sustainable business. This research focuses on how customer satisfaction can be improved in inter-customer relationships. We found that a structural equation analysis of some action data about consumer behaviors with three constituents of products that are supposed to ameliorate consumer gratification gives us deeper and clearer insight into the spreading process of customer satisfaction. And those three components are matching factor, purchasing factor, and customer satisfaction improvement factor. This research contributes to the fields of both consumer behavior and service science by introducing a new scheme that identifies factors in the building process of consumer satisfaction.

In recent years, the sports population has increased because of health orientation and improvement of the sports environment. We propose a platform by which leaders and learners can share the training contents with interactive training and can be feedback to leaders. The platform is intended to create the learning result jointly by leaders with the learners and leaders to update the learning contents. Through analysis of video data, the proposed solution helps learners obtain skills in a desired sport even in the absence of a real trainer.

In service engineering a formalized process model gives the advantage that its complexity is reduced due to abstraction and could simplify the communication by specialists, e.g. business process analysts and IT specialists. At some point a more intuitively and tangible depiction of a service situation is needed. This is the case if people that may be not as versed on the theoretical side, e.g. customers, employees and decision makers, are involved in the creation or evaluation of the process. Therefore, we have developed a visualization toolset for the use with a ServCAD system. This toolset enables the user to visualize relevant parts of the process model as an interactive 3D scene. Changes are consistent on the data model, and each change on the 2D BPM view or in the 3D process scene is stored and presented simultaneously.

System surveillance is a function required for continuous operation of a system which consists of various apparatus and networks. Many service providers try to raise their productivity. Their methods show some information to a surveillance worker after the alarm occurs. As another method of the rationalization, a surveillance system shows some information to the worker on the waiting time. The simulated environment of surveillance has been built. There are three kinds of screens that are shown to the subject on waiting state. Passive case test uses passive waiting screen that displays no information. Directed case test uses directed waiting screen that displays operation method. Active case test uses active waiting screen that displays list of surveillance objects and can be scrolled by subject. Subjects’ stress are performed by R-R interval. By comparing 12 subjects, it was confirmed that they are working efficiently in the test which display some information, and active case test that encourages voluntary browsing allows subjects to relax. It is an effective method of a productivity improvement and stress reduction to display the information that encourage voluntary browsing on waiting time.

Sliding sheet is a tool for changing positions and postures of bedridden patients. In the present study, in order to provide education service of sliding sheet, we examined skill points during the pulling movement of sliding sheet with regression analysis. Further, we proposed an automatic education system with Kinect camera basing on the results of the analysis. In the regression analysis, according to prior research, we included bending angle of waist, opening angle of legs, and angle of arm flex as three independent variables and moment of lumbar extension as a dependent variable. According to the results of regression analysis, we found that in order to minimize the load of lumbar during the pulling motion, participant should bend their body close to the bed, spread their legs widely to lower their center of gravity, and straighten their arms to the bed. Furthermore, basing on the results of our analysis, we proposed an evaluation service with Kinect camera, overlaying recommended posture on picture of learners’ body and giving evaluations on the load of their lumbar to the learners. We believe that our education service will be useful for the spread of sliding sheet.

Evaluation of the quality of nursing care is vital, but customer or outcome evaluation is difficult. In this study, the word Kizkey, from the Japanese kizuki, is used to describe caregivers’ awareness of the condition of care recipients. The study focused on Kizkey as the key to better nursing care and used it to evaluate the quality of nursing care. Field study data showed differences in Kizkey between skilled caregivers and novices. There was an association between these and the quality of care provided. Based on these findings, it is suggested that a new method for evaluating the quality of nursing care services could be developed.

This paper describes roles of servicing activity visualization in quality control (QC) circle based on a field study. The field study was conducted in order to investigate how human behavior sensing and visualization technologies support QC circle activities conducted by waitresses. We conducted the field study at a Japanese cuisine restaurant, “Ganko Shinjuku Yamano Aiko-tei,” located in Tokyo just after it launched. Positions and directions of the waitresses were measured in order to grasp the conditions objectively. The visualized position data was shown to QC circle members. They discussed what they should improve preferentially based on the visualized position. In the visualization, the map of the restaurant was divided into small grids, and accumulated stay time in each grid area was visualized by color and overlaid on the map. From this visualization result, they recognize that they stayed relatively longer on backyards than dining area. Then, they inferred the cause themselves. This visualization result is used not only in this discussion but also used for explanation of their QC themes to inexperienced waitresses. About 1 month since the opening of the restaurant, the second measurement had been conducted in order to confirm the result of their QC activities. The comparison results of the measured positions and sales data were shown to QC circle members. They evaluated the result of their own activities. In the meeting, we conducted the inquiring survey about roles on which human activity sensing and visualization play in QC circle activities. The visualized results show that they stayed longer time in dining area during the second measurement term than the first term. QC circle members pointed out that the visualized result had them be able to lead inexperienced waitresses to tackle problems calmly and set priorities on their problems to be tackled. This comment is important because it implicates potential ability of servicing activity visualization.

For suppliers it is a significant theme to know how much their services satisfied customers. Questionnaire survey is often adopted; however, the reply from customers is not always accurate. This paper describes a detecting method of a more accurate reply by entrusting the reply for the services to unconscious responses reflecting activities of autonomic nervous system during sleep. Such experiment was performed on the idea that there is some relationship between satisfaction and conditions of both mental and physical activities. As a result, the unconscious responses of phenomena of respiration and pulse through nights showed satisfaction instead of conscious responses.

Patient surveys at a Japan hospital were analyzed using distance to explore changes in similarities among care services, by waiting time, length of stay, and hospital remodeling. In an outpatient survey, the overall rating moved from a general interpersonal skill cluster to a personalized care cluster as waiting time became longer. In an inpatient survey, the three clusters of environment, interpersonal skills, and technical skills were consolidated into environment and the other one as length of stay became longer. After hospital remodeling, overall rating moved to a different cluster. Analysis using distance has the potential to explore the hidden structure of patient satisfaction.

This study investigates the service satisfaction and consciousness-attitude gap of foreigners visiting Japan with the aim of finding methods of increasing visitors’ levels of expenditure. Structural equation modeling is employed to investigate the relationships between service quality, service value, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and willingness to pay. The results show that lodging, food and drink, and shopping services all have an influence on loyalty. Shopping services also have a significant influence on willingness to pay. More than half of the tourists maintain expenditure gap, as their actual spending is less than their expected budgets. Although they have a higher willingness to pay in relation to food and drink services, these services do not provide more satisfaction and loyalty than other services.

An artifact, or something made by a human being, can create value through mutual interaction among providers, consumers, and other artifacts. Moreover, an artifact can alter its nature to products or services according to the information completeness of its purpose and environment. This paper presents a discussion of how value is cocreated in a society by considering some relevant concepts or theories for “cocreation” such as emergent synthesis, the theory of “ba,” coproduction, and service-dominant logic (SDL). Additionally, the value of a service is reconsidered from the perspective of economic or behavioral value. Finally, this paper presents discussion of the new role of science and technologies to cocreate value in a sustainable society through mutual interaction among consumers and producers.

This paper develops the conceptual framework for value cocreation of service through key concept analysis, developed for this paper, extracting constituent concepts from the key concepts involved in project statement documents from the Japanese governmental service science research program, identifying structural relationships among the constituent concepts, and integrating them into the framework. The developed framework reveals several structural features of value cocreation of service, namely, the importance of the introduction of the reproduction cycle into the service-dominant logic, the introduction of the value cocreation mechanism into the provider side, and three types of value created in service.

Service use processes have assumed a significant role in recent service development. In response to a need for the development of a service Computer Aided Design (CAD) with use-oriented design method, this paper examines the relationship among use processes, functions, and service provision based on Yoshikawa’s study on function in engineering and service-dominant logic in marketing. We extend a service model between a provider and a receiver to represent dynamic synthesis of functions through use processes. Design operations executed on the model can include contributions by both the provider and receiver in terms of effectiveness, adaptation, and creation. Finally, we apply the model to two case studies from different industries and verify its effectiveness.

Clinical environment is very complex, and flexible and adaptive service improvement is crucial in maintaining quality of medical care. Thus, incremental software development in hospital information system and its evaluation are important. This paper introduces a statistical estimation method of an embedded software in which service logs are used to measure the differences between responsive time before and after a new interface has been introduced. The empirical results show that statistical methods are useful to evaluate the system performance in a real clinical environment.

This study discusses the microstructure of the prices of aesthetic services using the model developed by Epstein and Schneider [1]. Because ambiguity regarding the quality of novel aesthetic technology prompts consumers to behave based on the assumption of the worst possible outcome, the demand for aesthetic services is low before the consumer experiences a novel aesthetic service. In addition, even though visitors see signals of the good quality of future services through their first experience, they remain pessimistic regarding the quality of the future services because of the variance in outcomes. For consumers, purchasing multiple tickets in one specific salon increases idiosyncratic risk. Thus, transparent information is crucial to increasing demand.

Developing new businesses is one of the important activities in Japanese companies. There have been many training programs or professional services for developing new businesses in this country. However, most of them have been designed for large enterprises that are rich in resources. On the other hand, small and midsized enterprises (SMEs) that are poor in resources have little access to such programs or services. Meanwhile, SMEs comprise 99.7 % of the total number of Japanese companies. In order for Japan’s economy to have sustainable growth, business development in SMEs is critically important. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a system to design training programs for developing new businesses for SMEs. It employs systems engineering methodology with participatory systems analysis. The evaluation result indicates that this system is quite effective and means a lot for SMEs. By applying systems engineering in service design, our study shows that the designed programs could provide high customer satisfaction, even if they were designed by nonprofessionals.

Currently, the importance of services is widely accepted in various industries. Given this background, fundamental research on service engineering is carried out quite actively. Service engineering seeks to provide design methodology for services from an engineering perspective.In product and service design, designers are generally forced to spend a lot of redesign works if design changes occur at a late stage of the design process. Thus, it is important for designers to validate design solutions in the early stage(s) of the design process by using simulation methods. However, simulation models in the existing methods are built with quantitative information. In the early stages of the service design process, most of the information about a design solution is still not defined; therefore, it is difficult to obtain sufficient quantitative information. For obtaining such quantitative information, service providers need to offer a designed service to their customers as a trial, which impose much effort for building quantitative simulation models. In order to reduce such risks, this research applies a qualitative simulation method, which can be used to analyze the behavior of systems with fuzzy qualitative information. In this paper, we propose a method to build a qualitative simulation model with the design information available at the early stage(s) of the service design process. This method would enable designers to evaluate a design solution in the early stage of a service design process and would increase quality of the service design.

Understanding people’s activities and travel behaviors has gained attention in service research field as well as in transportation research field. Recently, there are a lot of studies utilizing GPS (Global Positioning System) trajectory data to analyze travel behaviors after identifying each trip. Although transportation service level (e.g., travel time or waiting time) and our travel behaviors would change due to weather and seasonal factors, there is no research to evaluate an automated detection/identification model for GPS trajectory data. In this study, we compare a trip frequency (trip purpose of shopping and health, which are nonmandatory trips) and an accuracy of the detection/identification model by using long-term person trip survey data, which is conducted for each 4 months in summer and winter in Hakodate city, Japan. From the results, we confirm that a variation of car trip frequency is small and a tendency of mode change from bicycle in summer to walking in winter is strong due to snowy roadside condition. Moreover, random forest method as the detection/identification model has small effect to seasonal variations if multi-seasonal data is combined.

This paper begins to integrate the technical literature on smart service systems with the more established policy literature on industry, academic, government collaborations. IBM’s existing Collaborative Innovation Centers (CICs) serve to ground the discussion in practice. CICs are an example of a Triple Helix smart service system, designed to rapidly close skills gaps and to accelerate the growth of high-skill jobs, essential to regional economic development and quality of life in knowledge economies. As such, this paper further provides insight into CIC design methodology and comparison with alternate types of collaborative centers highlighting differentiated design dimensions.

Electric power systems in the world are undergoing a structural reform. An electricity trading market that is consisted of distributed energy resources such as renewable power generators and bidirectional transmission networks is one idea regarding the future form of electricity market. This study models the electricity market in a way where each player takes both roles of supplier and consumer, power generation capacity is distributed, energy storage is partially installed, and transactions are made by a double auction mechanism. An analysis conducted by the method of laboratory economic experiment focuses on the relationship between various conditions of energy storage distribution among the players and the level of market efficiency. The result is that energy storage has both positive and negative impacts on the market: it reduces the amount of wasted energy and attains the efficient allocation of energy, but on the other hand it has a potential to make the market unstable.