This book provides a useful overall guide to the state of the art in theory and practice of services. It can also serve as a reference book for researchers in various fields, including engineering, marketing, economics, and other disciplines. Advanced works presented here were selected from the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Serviceology (ICServ2014), held September 14–16, 2014. This book helps readers to understand serviceology, which tackles with a broad range of services, the globalization of the economy and also enhances the quality of life of local residents.

This book contains revised selected and invited papers presented at the International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems, MMAS 2018, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in July 2018. The 7 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. Also included are 3 post-workshop papers. The papers discuss enabling technologies, new architectures, promising applications, and challenges of massively multi-agent systems in the era of IoT. They are organized in the following topical sections: multi-agent systems and Internet of Things; architectures for massively multi-agent systems; and applications of massively multi-agent systems.

This book intends to present and discuss the main challenges that companies interested in servitization strategies have to overcome, with a particular focus on the design of managerial control systems. The book can represent a useful tool for companies interested developing successful servitization strategies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Serviceology for Services, held in Osaka, Japan, in March 2020. The 16 full papers and 3 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized around the following topics: hospitality management; service innovation and employee engagement; service marketing and consumer behavior; customer experience and service design; service engineering and implementation.

Services are key activities in a globalized economy and they also underlie the quality of life of local residents. The advanced work presented in this book was selected from the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Serviceology (ICServ2015), held July 7–9, 2015, in San Jose, CA, USA. The conference was supported by the Society for Serviceology. The society was established in 2012 in Japan to explore the scientific systematization of services and to promote technological developments for solutions to industrial issues. This book provides a useful general guide to the state of the art in the theory and practice of services. It can also serve as a valuable reference book for researchers in a wide range of fields from engineering to marketing and economics.

This book showcases cutting-edge research papers from the 8th International Conference on Research into Design (ICoRD 2021) written by eminent researchers from across the world on design processes, technologies, methods and tools, and their impact on innovation, for supporting design for a connected world. The theme of ICoRD‘21 has been “Design for Tomorrow”. The world as we know it in our times is increasingly becoming connected. In this interconnected world, design has to address new challenges of merging the cyber and the physical, the smart and the mundane, the technology and the human. As a result, there is an increasing need for strategizing and thinking about design for a better tomorrow. The theme for ICoRD’21 serves as a provocation for the design community to think about rapid changes in the near future to usher in a better tomorrow. The papers in this book explore these themes, and their key focus is design for tomorrow: how are products and their development be addressed for the immediate pressing needs within a connected world? The book will be of interest to researchers, professionals and entrepreneurs working in the areas on industrial design, manufacturing, consumer goods, and industrial management who are interested in the new and emerging methods and tools for design of new products, systems and services.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Serviceology for Services, held in Vienna, Austria, in July 2017. The 21 full papers and one tutorial paper presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. The papers are organized around the following topics: human-centered service; customer satisfaction; service innovation and marketing; service design.

This book presents advances on the state of the art in smart cities systems and applications based on the proof of concept and prototyping for smart cities in an interdisciplinary context of engineering and information sciences. Smart cities have emerged as highly complex technological endeavors that combine knowledge and technology from many disciplines ranging from information sciences to engineering. Due to their complex nature, the modeling, development, and prototyping of applications in smart cities present a myriad of challenges, including technical, economic, and social ones, across application subdomains such as smart transportation, social welfare, tourism, and smart industry. It becomes difficult or sometimes impossible to provide a solution for such potential research issues and challenges from a traditional disciplinary-approach only; to tackle such research issues and to make the paradigm of smart cities a reality, interdisciplinary approaches are deemed necessary. Readers, developers, practitioners, and policy-makers in the field find in the book insights, experiences, findings, and perspectives on smart cities applications with an emphasis on real-life prototyping, beyond the confines of laboratory experiments.

Services are key activities in the globalization of the economy and also underlie the quality of life of local residents. The advanced work presented in this book was selected from the proceedings of the First International Conference on Serviceology (ICServ2013), held October 16–18, 2013 in Tokyo. This book provides a useful overall guide to the state of the art in theory and practice of services for researchers in various fields, including engineering, marketing, economics, and others. This work also facilitates the scientific systematization of services and promotes technological developments for solutions of industrial issues.