A Novel Framework for Product/Service Systems Using Environment-Based Design Methodology

The diversity of costumer’s needs requires manufacturers to provide a complex package of product and service. In contrast to traditional matured methods used for product design, Product/Service Systems (PSS) design still has a large room for development because of three following core research challenges: 1) development of a common shared structure to represent and understand PSS’s elements and their relations; 2) systematic modelling approaches to formulating design problems; and 3) holistic consideration of social, technological, economic and ecological elements.This paper aims to propose a novel framework for PSS design by addressing three issues above. The proposed framework is derived step-by-step from a natural language description of PSS environment using Environment-Based Design (EBD) methodology. The proposed framework attempts to accommodate the recursive scenarios in PSS design along with PSS lifecycle. The PSS environment will be firstly analyzed through a question-asking strategy. Besides, a set of graphical tools will be presented to support the development of framework, such as product-environment system, performance network, and conflict map. A case study, concerning the service design of intellectual property protection in collaborative product development, will be presented to illustrate the proposed framework.Copyright © 2014 by ASME