Establishment of a function embodiment knowledge base for supporting service design

In service engineering, a service is represented as a functional structure that satisfies customer requirements. Specific entities and their activities are associated with a functional structure as a way to accomplish a goal. In this phase, it is important for service designers to have broad knowledge, since entities that construct a service include both human and physical products. Therefore, the extent of the designer's knowledge is the key to the enhancement of design solutions. However, few tools to support designers in the embodiment phase have been proposed. In this paper, for the purpose of constructing a function embodiment knowledge base in service design, the representational form of knowledge is proposed, and a prototype system of function embodiment knowledge base is established. Then function embodiment knowledge is collected from multiple service cases using the prototype system, and the effectiveness of knowledge base is discussed.