A clustering approach for modularizing service-oriented systems
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A clustering approach for modularizing service-oriented systems Omar Ezzat1
· Khaled Medini1
· Xavier Boucher1
· Xavier Delorme1
Received: 17 December 2019 / Accepted: 12 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Companies are seeking more and more to offer customized goods and services to customers to be able to satisfy their needs. Several methods emerged to fulfill the needs of customization without affecting the performance of the company. Modularity has been considered as an effective method to address the challenges regarding variety management in the product and service domain. It has been addressed in the product domain but rarely in the service domain. This paper aims to provide a method to modularize a service-oriented system that consists of products and services. The method uses a set of modularization criteria and clustering techniques to form service-oriented system modules (product and/or service modules). The output of the clustering process is evaluated using indicators to provide decision-makers with insights into potentially preferred clustering alternatives. A test case is presented in order to show the applicability of the method. Keywords Product modularity · Service modularity · Service-oriented system · Clustering · Variety management
Introduction Customers nowadays are seeking customized goods and services to fulfill their specific needs. Therefore, companies have headed towards more technologically advanced methods that will help them meet customer needs without affecting their performance, through new business paradigms such as Mass Customization (MC). MC is defined as a way to deliver customized products and services to fulfill customer needs with similar efficiency to mass production. MC has been increasingly used by industrial companies over the last 15 years, especially in the manufacturing domain. Over the last few years, however, it has started to emerge in the service field. Nevertheless being able to offer customized products and services is correlated with an increase in the internal complexity of the production system. This complexity is heightened when integrating both products and services together to form a service-oriented system. To overcome that complexity, several methods have been proposed, such as modularity. This method consists of forming modules out of several components. Product modularity is defined as the usage of standardized and compatible components that will
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Omar Ezzat [email protected] Mines Saint-Etienne, Univ Clermont Auvergne, CNRS, UMR 6158 LIMOS, Henri Fayol Institute, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France
help in configuring the variety of end products (Schilling 2000). Modularity emerges from the partition of a product into several independent sets of components. This independence boosts the usage of the standardized elements and permits the designers to create more easily a wide range of product variety using a much smaller set of input elements. This applies to both product and service domains an
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