In the current engineering practices, buildings are commonly designed for an effective lifetime of 50 years. This lifetime can increase the cost of buildings with short lifetimes and can reduce the safety level of buildings with large lifetimes. In this paper, a “service-life factor” has been defined. Applying this factor into the nominal values of live, earthquake, wind, and snow loads, the ef...

A global Web services to support the delivery of service -based economy have had a tremendous impact on the web as a potential silver bullet. However , despite the excellent progress of a web rate has been significantly lower than anticipated at the beginning of their uptake. The isolation of services, the lack of social relationships among related services, inadequate trade-offs between the ex...

Engineering consulting services constitutes a key knowledge-intensive sector that has existed for a long time, but has gained new importance as a result of the intensification of knowledge-based competition. The emergence of the new economy challenges the ways that engineering consultants have traditionally created and applied new knowledge. Professional engineering services have typically been...

Recent years have brought many changes in the U.S. economy. The rapid development of telecommunications and the Internet are only two examples of an incredible continuing evolution and progressively changing business environment. Correspondingly, economists and statisticians are improving their tools for measuring the economy. One basic tool is the classification of businesses by industry. Sinc...

Inspired by Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, many economists have postulated the existence of invisible forces that drive economic markets. These market forces interact in complex ways making it difficult to visualize or understand the interactions in every detail. Here I show how these forces can transcend a zero-sum game and become a win-win business interaction, thanks to emergent social syne...

The emergence of profit-based online platforms for the peer-to-peer sharing of consumer goods provides new means for the end users to derive profit from their possessions. The success of these platforms relies heavily on the behavior of their participants. Using an agent-based model simulating these behaviors via different scenarios, we show how these mechanisms are efficient to improve the inf...

The emerging discipline of Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) apart from developing theories strives to build and evaluate IT artifacts of utility for the service economy. Especially due to the interdisciplinary character of this new discipline and the imprint of rather behavioral science oriented disciplines, for some problem areas only few innovative artifacts have been scienti...

Although services play a crucial role in economy, service did not gain as much importance as productivity management in manufacturing. This paper presents key findings from literature and practice. Based on an initial definition of complex services, seven productivity concepts are briefly presented and assessed by relevant, complex service specific criteria. Following the findings a complex ser...

Knowledge-Based Decision Support Systems (KBDSS) have evolved greatly over the last few decades. The key technologies underpinning the development of KBDSS can be classified into three categories: technologies for knowledge modelling and representation, technologies for reasoning and inference, and Web-based technologies. In the meantime, service systems have emerged and become increasingly imp...