Article Preview
TopBackground
Service science requires multidisciplinary approach that integrates elements of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, social and cognitive sciences, legal sciences, and so on (Council on Competitiveness, 2004; IBM Research). OR/MS is commonly thought to play an important role in service science where service are scientifically analyzed. However, as Hidaka (2006) pointed out, services usually include many components that cannot be properly expressed as mathematical models and thus cannot be solved by OR/MS in isolation. It may be caused by human factor or social practice and regulation. For such problems, it is necessary for OR/MS to collaborate with other fields of research.
As mentioned above, OR/MS is in general regarded as one of the tools of service science. Compared with this, this research regards OR/MS (more properly, OR/MS decision support) as one of the objects of research in service science. There are some bodies of research that discuss the necessity of applying OR/MS to service or the expectation to such studies. However, there is little research that explicitly analyzes OR/MS as a service.