Beyond Traditional Metrics: The Power of Value Entropy in Multidimensional Evaluation of the Service Ecosystem

With the increasing prevalence of smart services in our daily lives, service ecosystems are rapidly emerging across various domains, including E-commerce, cloud manufacturing, and crowdsourcing, among others. However, evaluating the utility of service ecosystems presents several challenges due to their complex characteristics, including the diversity in crowd intelligence, the cascading effects of service networks, and the interest game among individuals. Current evaluation methods are limited in providing a comprehensive system-wide view, highlighting various shortcomings. To address these challenges, this article introduces a multidimensional and integrated model for evaluating service utility, comprising three key components: (1) The individual utility model is built to facilitate the transition from specific scenarios to general evaluations. (2) Value entropy is introduced to assess the impact of nonlinear emergence on system utility. (3) The system utility model is used to enable the integration of both linear and nonlinear factors within the system. Furthermore, a crowdsourcing service platform is taken as an example to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model is effective in providing new means and ideas for evaluating and analyzing service ecosystems.

I. Introduction

Today, the rapid advancement of intelligent technologies, such as the Internet, Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, virtual reality, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, is driving the accelerated evolution of human society. This has led to the emergence of a new social infrastructure known as "smart services", which can be described by the equation "data + computing power + AI algorithm = smart services". As a result, the entire society is gradually transforming into a service ecosystem, where a unified "services" logic is applied to everything, including applications, platforms, data, algorithms, and resources, known as "Everything as a Service" (XaaS) [1], [2].