Requirements for an Ontological Foundation for Modelling Social Service Chains

The Social Services Chain is the network of social services through which clients flow. At an abstract level, this is very much like a job shop in that each client moving through the chain requires a unique set and sequence of services, but that these services often have to be repeated as required by the individual needs of a client. When we consider realistic problems for social services, however, the representations underlying traditional approaches, such as job shops, lack the expressiveness required for high fidelity models. In order to apply industrial and systems engineering techniques to the social services chain, we must first understand and be able to represent/model the characteristics of clients and services that uniquely distinguish social services from other service sectors. This model is to be used in a multi-agent simulation environment to test theories to optimize social service delivery. This paper presents a set of requirements that a social service model must satisfy in order to achieve high fidelity. These requirements combine an industrial/systems engineering perspective with a social sciences perspective in order to capture the unique behavioural characteristics of clients and service providers.