Welcome to the research pages of the Service Systems Design research group

We belong to The University of Manchester’s Centre for Service Research.

Our research agenda is driven by the recent convergence between software and “conventional” services. Indeed, software often underpins the innovative delivery of services in a business context to the extent that the two aspects of a service are often difficult to tell apart.

We use this convergence to design innovative services through the use of contemporary software technologies, but also to research the design of better software applications through the use of ideas which ensure the flexibility and the quality of delivery in conventional services and service-based organisations, for example focusing on the service providers as active participants in the process of composing quality services, and focusing on service users as active participants in the creation of service assemblies and applications tuned to their needs.

The two examples belong to two main strands of approaches we use to ensure flexibility of service-based software applications:

1. Flexibility through the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques. Our work in Intelligent Service Systems can be divided into two themes:
1. Semantic Services – the use of ontologies and DL reasoning to support the creation and evolution of flexible service assemblies; and
2. Intelligent Convergent Services – treating the evolution of service assemblies as similar to the evolution of virtual organisations, and using intelligent software agents to represent the interests of service providers, reasoning over innovative coordination models.
2. Flexibility ensured by the end users of a service who are empowered to create and adapt their own service assemblies, ensuring fit to their changing needs at work or leisure. Here we embrace user-centric design approaches to:
1. Discover user attitudes, needs and mental models regarding services and service assemblies, including studies of trade-offs between risks and benefits from users getting involved with services, and notational studies of users resolving service design problems.
2. Build and evaluate user-friendly service design tools, using intelligent reasoning to hide the technical complexity from end users, and providing user-friendly representations and adaptation models derived from our user studies.