An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Decision Engineering Report Series : Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2): THINK TANK

Cranfield University and Rolls-Royce plc designed and developed a one-day ‘Think- Tank’ international workshop to establish the future research direction for Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2). The workshop was held at Cranfield University, UK, by invitation only to visionary academics across the globe, senior industrialists and funding organisations. The workshop aimed to trigger discussions on high impact challenges involved in IPS2. The research directions from the workshop could inform IPS2 researchers and research funding decisions in the future. The overall objectives were to: Engage multi-disciplinary academics and practitioners in a deeper discussion to identify major research directions for the future. Identify the unique challenges faced in IPS2 and also any country specific requirements. Prioritise the research directions into mid-term and long-term categories. Identify major industry and public procurement trends across different countries. The workshop design has gone through two main phases. Prior to commencing the event, the participants submitted their thoughts on either “IPS2 Research Directions” or “Industrial requirements for IPS2” and these were thoroughly analysed. During the event, the analysed results were presented and followed by capturing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis) to IPS2 research across different countries. One of the main strengths of the research area is that IPS2 research is maturing in international profile and creating wide awareness of its importance among stakeholders. How the bigger picture of IPS2 was described and the immaturity of models, tools and techniques developed for real industrial applications were major weaknesses of IPS2 research. To develop an enhanced understanding of IPS2 research results across countries, wider opportunities to establish a common case studying pool is suggested. Finally, prolonged research funding for analysing real impact on industry is a major threat widely discussed. Every delegate had to express his/her views on potentially high-impact in their countries. Combined grouping analysis of these answers gave ten common themes within them. Examples of these common themes are cost, skills, design and manufacturing, society, and case studies. These themes underwent a rigorous prioritization process by the delegates to identify high impact challenges. From the prioritization of grouped challenges, the themes - Design and Manufacturing, Case studies, Business capability, Cost and Complexity, all emerged as the foremost areas on which to concentrate

A framework to inform PSS Conceptual Design by using system-in-use data

Both the Product-Service System (PSS) literature and industry express a need to close the design loop by using product-in-use data to inform PSS Conceptual Design. Nevertheless, how to actually accomplish this is largely unknown. This research makes use of the literature as well as findings from interviews and case studies with industry as the basis for a framework which could utilise system-in-use (rather than just product-in-use) data from in-service records and receiver needs regarding the use of large, capital-intensive, technical assets to generate solutions which could aid the conception of PSS at the Conceptual Design stage

A Knowledge Flow Model to Capture Unstructured Product Development Processes: A Knowledge Flow Model

Product knowledge emerges from day‐to‐day, ubiquitous interactions executed by engineers. Types of interaction and their associated influence on knowledge activities are often not perceptible, and therefore not captured in current industrial practices. To emphasize the importance of interactions, an interaction‐centric model, along with necessary knowledge elements, is proposed. To evaluate the usefulness of the proposed model, two industrial observational case studies were conducted. In total, nine engineers were observed. The paper reports validation of the proposed model emphasizing interaction as a core element associated with knowledge activities and mapping knowledge elements. The frequency and duration of time spent on the variety of interaction types and knowledge activities are detailed. The commonly used interactions for respective knowledge activities are elaborated. The proposed model should help understand knowledge activities in organizations better and act as a valuable tool for conducting knowledge audit. Elicitation of the types of interactions and supporting knowledge activities should help engineers improve their understanding and their influences on product developmen

Advances in designing product-service systems

Product-Service Systems (PSS) have emerged as a class of hybrid business models that have evolved particular relevance to enterprises operating in a resource-efficient, circular economy (environments that places an emphasis on sustainable, collaborative, system-centric perspectives). More than a decade of PSS research has produced some significant contributions, especially in the area of business models, and performance measures associated with delivering successful PSS solutions. This paper reviews recent advances in the existing literature and assesses the essential components required for designing a sustainable PSS. The vital components identified by this analysis of the literature are: PSS ontology, requirements definition, design process support for generating PSS concepts, and the evaluation of PSS concepts. The review highlights the state-of-the-art PSS research in these four areas, and discusses research gaps and directions for future research

Advances in designing product-service systems

Product-Service Systems (PSS) have emerged as a class of hybrid business models that have evolved particular relevance to enterprises operating in a resource-efficient, circular economy (environments that places an emphasis on sustainable, collaborative, system-centric perspectives). More than a decade of PSS research has produced some significant contributions, especially in the area of business models, and performance measures associated with delivering successful PSS solutions. This paper reviews recent advances in the existing literature and assesses the essential components required for designing a sustainable PSS. The vital components identified by this analysis of the literature are: PSS ontology, requirements definition, design process support for generating PSS concepts, and the evaluation of PSS concepts. The review highlights the state-of-the-art PSS research in these four areas, and discusses research gaps and directions for future research

A review of product-service systems design methodologies

Product–service systems (PSS), motivated to fulfil customers’ needs, are seen as good strategies to face today's competitive business environment. The field of PSS research is however not fully mature and many different methodologies are proposed for the PSS design. This paper seeks to understand the directions taken in eight state-of-the-art methodologies so as to identify common needs in future research. The methodologies are studied across their authors’ views and definitions of services, PSS and their objectives and challenges, along with the tools that have been developed. A maturity model is built to access the current PSS design across 20 dimensions. The model highlights that only three dimensions are strongly treated: design processes for integrating products and services, definitions of new terminologies and considerations concerning planning and designing life-cycle phases. To enhance the industrial application, collaboration between researchers and practitioners can be spurred through two challenges: common ontology and models for representation of PSS. Particular attention must also be placed on sustainability as current models do not support the generation of sustainable PSS. As a whole, the review shows that the PSS design is still in initial stages of development and substantial research is required to develop a practical PSS design methodology

Influences of design tools on the original and redesign processes

Concept generation plays a vital role in establishing a broader foundation in the design process to create novel products. In the globalized, collaborative, designing scenario, an unambiguous representation of captured ideas to explicate a designer’s thoughts is important in the sharing and reuse of concepts. Various design studies have noted the impact of design tools on concept generation. However, the results did not detail the influences of a variety of tools on the representation and reinterpretation of concepts through captured design documents. The goal of this paper was to understand the influence of conceptual design tools: Hi-Tech Mobile e-Notes Taker, Wacom Tablet, and Rhinoceros CAD with MS Word/PowerPoint on concept representation and reinterpretation, during the original and redesign phases. Eighteen design experiments, involving six individual student designers’ solving three design problems each, were conducted in the original and redesign phases. The analyses of 26 variables from captured documents and video protocols reveal that the design tools had a statistically significant impact on four key variables: the total time taken to solve each problem, the time spent on detailed design activity, the textual representation of structural requirements, and the graphical representation of the structure of detailed concepts. Irrespective of the design tool used, novice designers generated a low number of redesign concepts. This makes us conclude that designers might require training for reinterpretation and extracting necessary information from the concepts originally captured, rather than working with poor understanding, ambiguity, and assumptions about the original designer’s intent