CONCEPT MODEL. The aim of the concept model is to identify the most important concepts about which one has to communicate in order to support and fulfil the value-based process model. In the concept model, semantics are defined on a deep level as a basis for the information model. The information (on the instance level) using the information model must be understood in the right way by the receiver of information. In the information model, new concepts are introduced based on the concept model to cover all important information needs. The concept definitions are loosely grouped by information model view (see section 5). Since some concepts appear in many views, this grouping is not strict. Concept Description Service view Customer Is an Agent that buys or rents a product or a service from a company or an individual. Customer Value Customer experienced benefits seen as potentials for revenues in the customer's market. Customer Activity An act that changes the condition of an object performed by a customer. Need Experienced and expressed requirements of resources (e.g. services) to develop values in line with customer goals. Service An executable activity that when executed results in a certain desired state of an object of interest to the customer. Service Function A part of a service. The service functions contained in a service together realize the service. Manual Effort A service function that is manually executed. Functional Product A service function that is realized through a machine together with services. Service Use An execution of a service, which occurs in a location using a machine installation. Service Availability The availability of a service for use expressed in some unit. Service Reliability The reliability of a service when used expressed in same unit. Location A point of or set of points in space. Component view Physical Component An artefact that may be a machine, a sub system or an elementary component intended to be part of a machine. Machine A mechanical or other device that performs tasks. Sub System A delimited part of a machine with well defined external properties. Elementary Component A physical component considered not to be further subdivided. Machine Installation An instance of a Machine installed at a certain location. Component Characteristic A characteristic or property of interest of a physical component. Observation A perception of a state of interest made by an observator related to an operation in a service use resulting in a value. E...
CONCEPT MODEL. The concept model is the middle layer that allows minds to understand the re- ality. It is external to any agents and should be supplied by the builders of the environment. Otherwise, each agent will have to store a complete conceptual- ization of the world. An external concept model not only reduces redundancy but can also be extended without modifying all agents. Besides, agents will act believably and consistently if they use identical external concept model provided by environment. The concept model is primarily a set of interconnected concepts, which can be realized as ontologies and rules. Concepts and reality Although every object has its physical properties that can be represented numerically, people do not always understand it by these numerical values. Take temperature as an example again. If the temperature is lower than a ”normal standard” that the agent holds, it is ascribed as cold. Similarly, if the temperature is higher than a normal one, it is hot. If something has a very high temperature and starts emitting light, it is called a fire. Hot, cold and fire are concepts inferred from the environment. The reality must be transformed to a set of concepts before the agent can think about and use it. More concretely, an agent maps an aspect of the environment to an instance of concepts in the concept model. For physical objects, the correspondence between reality and concepts is obtained through a set of mapping functions. Artifacts, on the contrary, are directly assigned as instances of concepts during design time. Note that although the qualitative concepts of hot and cold are in most cases shared among human beings, each agent can have its own standard about the normal temperature. Thus, the mapping functions should sometimes take the personal traits of the agent as a parameter that affects the outcome. The system design described in section 4 reflects this. It is also important to note that although artifacts always match a concept perfectly, the matching between a physical object and a concept is usually im- perfect. In the case of artifacts, people have concepts first and then build the instances later. For example, people invented locks and keys because they only want to allow those who are authorized to access certain properties. Conversely, physical objects exist before any conceptual abstractions emerge, and therefore the categorization is usually ambiguous. Thus, the mapping functions return a similarity value that indicates the accura...
