Commitment-based Modeling of Service Systems

This contribution presents an ontological model of services that describes them as complex temporal entities, constituted by inter- relations of states, actions and processes, occurring in a wider service system. Our aim is to establish rigorous ontological foundations for the various basic notions of service science, including service, service system, service process, service system life-cycle, and service value co-creation. A crucial role in our approach is played by the notion of commitment, which allows us to provide a definition of service as generic commitment to guarantee the execution of value co-creation actions.