Rebuilding Evolution: A Service Science Perspective

This paper explores a simple idea and asks a simple question: What determines the speed limit of evolutionary processes, and might there be ways to speed up those processes for certain types of systems under certain conditions? Or even more simply, how rapidly can complex systems be rebuilt? To begin with, the universe can be viewed as an evolving ecology of entities. Entities correspond to types of systems - from atoms in stars to organisms on Earth to ideas in the heads of people. Service science is the study of the evolving ecology of service system entities, complex socio-technical systems with rights and responsibilities – such as people, businesses, and nations. We can only scratch the surface in this paper, but our explorations suggest this is an important research question and direction, especially as we enter the cognitive era of smart and wise service systems. For example, it takes a child multiple years of experience to learn language and basic social interactions skills, but could machine learning algorithms with the proper data sets learn those capabilities in a fraction of the time

Performing Hybrid Recommendation in Intermodal Transportation – the FTMarket System’s Recommendation Module

Diverse recommendation techniques have been already proposed and encapsulated into several e-business applications, aiming to perform a more accurate evaluation of the existing information and accordingly augment the assistance provided to the users involved. This paper reports on the development and integration of a recommendation module in an agent-based transportation transactions management system. The module is built according to a novel hybrid recommendation technique, which combines the advantages of collaborative filtering and knowledge-based approaches. The proposed technique and supporting module assist customers in considering in detail alternative transportation transactions that satisfy their requests, as well as in evaluating completed transactions. The related services are invoked through a software agent that constructs the appropriate knowledge rules and performs a synthesis of the recommendation policy

Time-Space Efficient Regression Testing for Configurable Systems

Configurable systems are those that can be adapted from a set of options. They are prevalent and testing them is important and challenging. Existing approaches for testing configurable systems are either unsound (i.e., they can miss fault-revealing configurations) or do not scale. This paper proposes EvoSPLat, a regression testing technique for configurable systems. EvoSPLat builds on our previously-developed technique, SPLat, which explores all dynamically reachable configurations from a test. EvoSPLat is tuned for two scenarios of use in regression testing: Regression Configuration Selection (RCS) and Regression Test Selection (RTS). EvoSPLat for RCS prunes configurations (not tests) that are not impacted by changes whereas EvoSPLat for RTS prunes tests (not configurations) which are not impacted by changes. Handling both scenarios in the context of evolution is important. Experimental results show that EvoSPLat is promising. We observed a substantial reduction in time (22%) and in the number of configurations (45%) for configurable Java programs. In a case study on a large real-world configurable system (GCC), EvoSPLat reduced 35% of the running time. Comparing EvoSPLat with sampling techniques, 2-wise was the most efficient technique, but it missed two bugs whereas EvoSPLat detected all bugs four times faster than 6-wise, on average.Comment: 14 page

E-COMMERCE IN AGRICULTURE: DEVELOPMENT, STRATEGY, AND MARKET IMPLICATIONS

Marketing,

E-COMMERCE: A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE FOOD SUPPLY/DEMAND CHAIN

The use of electronic commerce for quality control and cost cutting efficiencies by the food and agricultural industries in the United States is the focus of this paper. The food industry engages in e-commerce through 1.) Internet shopping for consumers called business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce 2.) Business-to-business (B2B) Internet market discovery exchanges used by food suppliers at any point in the supply chain, and 3.) Business-to-business (B2B) relationships that reduce costs and increase efficiencies in the procurement, storage and delivery of food to retail stores or distribution centers. This third use of e-commerce is the most highly developed and widely adopted. It allows retailers to share information about consumers' purchases and preferences with food manufacturers and farmers and for tracking food products' characteristics, source, and movement from production to consumer. This circle of information allows high quality and consistent products to be consumed at lower prices. This paper is about the development of e-commerce in the food industry, the economic concepts and goals that it meets, and the changes it brings to the industry. E-commerce both fosters and demands vertical coordination. It favors consolidation of firms. It changes the business culture from one of adversarial relationships to one of cooperation and trust. It changes the historical supply chain into a supply/demand loop while it lowers the cost of food. Policy issues arise around monopoly power, privacy, a diminution of variety, and the demise of small, undercapitalized firms.Industrial Organization, Marketing,

How Voice Can Change Customer Satisfaction: A Comparative Analysis between E-Commerce and Voice Commerce

Voice commerce is a newly evolving e-commerce channel where consumers communicate with dedicated systems on smart speakers or other devices using their voice, in order to find products. This paper comparatively investigates factors for customers’ satisfaction in voice commerce and ecommerce. Being the first study to scientifically analyze customer satisfaction factors in voice commerce and compare them with e-commerce, we conducted a survey with 178 consumers and used structural equation modeling for statistical hypotheses testing. The results show, that consumers have higher expectations in convenience for voice commerce than they have for ecommerce. Transaction process efficiency significantly influences satisfaction in voice commerce, but not in e-commerce. This research provides implications for future research on voice commerce strategy and system design