Describing Case Studies and Classifying Research Approaches

This initial chapter aims at providing a useful introduction and reference point to the research described in the following chapters. First of all, to provide a homogenous description of the existing approaches on service engineering, we introduce a common case study referring to the telecommunication domain. This case study will be used in the other chapters of this book to motivate and describe the presented approaches. The way in which the case study is described follows the approach developed in the S-Cube Network of Excellence. In addition, we also provide a classification of the research results proposed in the rest of the book, by relying on the S-Cube Integrated Research Framework. Such a classification allows the reader to have an idea about how the contributions deal with research in the service engineering field.