Recent years have seen the emergence of physical products that are digitally networked with other products and with information systems to enable complex business scenarios in manufacturing, mobility, or healthcare. These "smart products", which enable the co-creation of "smart service" that is based on monitoring, optimization, remote control, and autonomous adaptation of products, profoundly transform service systems into what we call "smart service systems". In a multi-method study that includes conceptual research and qualitative data from in-depth interviews, we conceptualize "smart service" and "smart service systems" based on using smart products as boundary objects that integrate service consumers' and service providers' resources and activities. Smart products allow both actors to retrieve and to analyze aggregated field evidence and to adapt service systems based on contextual data. We discuss the implications that the introduction of smart service systems have for foundational concepts of service science and conclude that smart service systems are characterized by technology-mediated, continuous, and routinized interactions.
Table A1 summarizes the various characteristics of the synthetic models used in the experiments, including the number of event types, the size of the state space, whether a challenging construct is contained (loops, duplicates, nonlocal choice, and concurrency), and the entropy of the process defined by the model (estimated based on a sample of size 10,000). The original models may contain either duplicate tasks (two conceptually different transitions with the same label) or invisible tasks (transitions that have no label, as their firing is not recorded in the event log). We transformed all invisible transitions to duplicates such that, when there was an invisible task i in the original model, we added duplicates for all transitions t that, when fired, enable the invisible transition. These duplicates emulate the combined firing of t and i. Since we do not distinguish between duplicates and invisible tasks, we combined this category.
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