Architecture for Integrated Service Systems

Even though the necessity of a holistic approach for service modeling is widely accepted no such approach is available by now. By analyzing existing service modeling approaches, service literature and by supervising an industrial project we identified several weak points within the field of service modeling. One main problem is the disregard of a clear separation of modeling levels (so called meta-levels). This leads to an unnecessary backlog within the field of service modeling as approaches are neither conformant to each other nor can they be compared. Therefore we suggest applying meta-levels (and corresponding technical spaces) within the area of service modeling, as known from other modeling domains. We outline the advantages of such an approach and we define which concepts are necessary for modeling services and what kind of impact they have on the idea of meta-levels within the service modeling domain.