The concept of Product-Service Systems (PSS) allows companies to offer customer focused products by matching classical product concepts with service concepts. This results in new challenges for the development phase. This publication aims to deduce and discuss a generic PSS development process. Therefore product and service development processes were analyzed and combined to a PSS development process. In its development, a PSS confronts the developer with new challenges. Most of these challenges can be assigned to a certain phase in the development, while some of them appear in the entire life-cycle of a PSS. During this research, it was the aim to match the detected challenges of PSS with methods that have been developed for supporting PSS development. The PSS development process, its challenges and methods are finally applied on a PSS case.
An ongoing trend in product development is to extend traditional products with appropriate services. This concept of Product-Service Systems (PSS) rises attractive opportunities for customers and companies. Based on literature an introduction into PSS development is given. PSS modeling and the dynamic behavior of PSS are discussed. Three suitable modeling methods are identified: Agent-Based Modeling (ABM),
System Dynamics (SD) and Discrete Event (DE) Simulation. In this paper the well-known DE approach is transferred from its traditional applications to PSS development. Characteristics of DE simulation and its benefits and limitations in context of PSS are presented. A major advantage is the forecast and evaluation of different scenarios. This contribution identifies possible application areas to support PSS development with DE simulation in context of both development process and PSS type.Three examples show the applicability of the DE approach in a wide range, one from literature and two academic ones. The results are discussed and an outlook to future modeling methodology is given.
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