KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany
Designing the Digital Transformation
Co-creation event for young academics
KSS Research Workshop 2017 will feature three selected themes in order to stimulate high quality submissions in important areas of service research.
The energy sector continues to undergo substantial structural changes. Currently, the expanding usage of renewable energy sources, the decentralization of energy supply and the market penetration of electric vehicles (EV) as well as stationary storages and smart devices have a significant impact on thefuture development of services in energy and mobility systems.
In the energy sector, for instance, the share of self-generated electricity in the overall electricity demand steadily increases. Consequently, utilities are transforming their business models from pure delivery of energy to tangible (energy) service providers. While services for the energy sector were traditionally limited to B2B services (e.g., ancillary services), the recent increase in "prosumption" shows that the need for a set of tangible, non-technical services in the energy retail market, taking consumer engagement into consideration, is no longer an issue of future services, but current reality. Moreover, the increasing volatility and uncertainty of power supply lead to a rising demand for flexibility, which cannot be provided by the conventional supply side alone. Services focusing on the demand side such as appropriate incentives (e.g. electricity tariffs), market designs, and service level concepts need to be developed and introduced. This requires new services in electricity retail markets, innovative marketing and comprehensive acceptance research and the investigation of future business models.
Consequently, the concept of service quality needs to be adapted to these developments and appropriate service level indicators need to be developed. EVs might be a part of this concept.
Furthermore, mobility and other services are required in order to simplify the market uptake and user acceptance of EV. Finally, in the current trend to 'access society', multi-modal mobility becomes attractive due to fast increasing data availability and therefore declining access costs, fostered by smart mobility services. Multi-modal trips are less costly, better for our health and have a lower environmental impact.
This track therefore seeks contributions enhancing the understanding of the future role of services in energy economics and (e-)mobility. Moreover, presentations and papers addressing the appropriate use of decision support methods in different phases of service innovation and marketing in these domains are welcome. Relevant topics include, but are not
limited to:
Demographic changes cause higher patient demands alongside severe cost pressure and increasing quality requirements. Therefore, more efficient health care services and logistics are desirable. Even though underlying planning problems in the area of Operations Research resemble the ones from other service or manufacturing industries health care services are especially challenging, because patients need different care than, for example, parts of cars. In addition, particularly interdisciplinary approaches are necessary for research on and improvement of health care services. While the focus of this track is on the analysis and Long-term careoptimization of health care services, it also considers the structure and design of the underlying service networks. Papers that address the challenge of considering multiple objectives for health care planning are especially welcome. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:
Market competitiveness as well as new technology developments raise the need for constantly reshaping and improving the organizational, controlling and manufacturing aspects of the lifecycle of products and services. Production industries are increasingly characterized by individualized customer needs shaping not only the final result but also the actual design, development, manufacturing and delivery process steps, as well as the associated business models. Furthermore, flexibility, customization and the need to be able to support real-time scenarios are crucial in order to be able to keep up to date with current developments. These requirements aim to be addressed by Industry 4.0 - a vision of tomorrow's manufacturing, where in intelligent factories, machines and products communicate with each other, cooperatively driving production. Key technological pillars for realizing Industry 4.0 are cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Services, which together facilitate the vision of the Smart Factories. Cyber-physical systems represent, control and monitor the actual physical processes, by creating a virtual copy of the physical world and making decentralized autonomous decisions. Facilitated by the Internet of Things, which refers to a worldwide network of interconnected heterogeneous objects that are uniquely addressable and are based on standard communication protocols, these intelligent autonomous systems are able to communicate with each other and with humans in real time. Furthermore, via the Internet of Services, both internal and cross-organizational services are offered and utilized by participants of the value chain. Finally, in the current era of digitalization, such scenarios are unthinkable without the utilization of Big Data technologies, where large data sets provided by the interconnected objects can be stored, managed and analyzed with scalable methods. Naturally, the employment of these technologies is associated with the need to evolve and develop new adequate business models. This tracks aims on discussing advantages of particular technologies, value creation and business models for platform providers, application developers, end-users, large and small organizations, and manufacturers in the context of product and service offering. Relevant topics or case studies include, but are not limited to: