Gokula Vijayumar Annamalai Vasantha

A review of product-service systems design methodologies

Product–service systems (PSS), motivated to fulfil customers’ needs, are seen as good strategies to face todays 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.

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.

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.

The impact of head movements on user involvement in mediated interaction

Communication takes place not only through speech, but also through gestures such as facial expressions, gaze, head movements, hand movements and body posture. Although developing rapidly, current communication platforms do not facilitate the types of behaviour we believe are needed to fully support non-verbal communication and make interactions more engaging and efficient. In this paper, we decided to focus our research specifically on the head rather than any other body part as it is a rich source of information for speech-related movement. Thus we aim in this study to investigate the value of incorporating head movements into the use of telepresence robots as communication platforms; by means of investigating a system that manually reproduces head movement as closely as possible. The essential quantitative results revealed no significant differences on any of the measures we used. However, the qualitative information from the experiment indicates of further research will be useful in this area. These findings suggest that an enclose body language are required for a real-time communication beside the head nodding. We examine engagement within conversational behaviours of the subject when interacting with a socially expressive system.We found real-time communication requires more than verbal communication, and head nodding.Head nodding effects depend on precise on-screen movement by synchronize the on-screen movement with the head movement.

Industry Practices and Challenges in Using Product in Use Data to Inform PSS Conceptual Design

Both Product-Service System (PSS) literature and industry express a need to close the design loop by feeding productin- use data to conceptual design. Nevertheless, how to actually accomplish this for PSS Conceptual Design is largely absent. This paper uses the literature and findings from interviews with industry as the basis for a system which could utilize product-in-use data from the sensors of large, capital-intensive, technical assets along with in-service records as well as receiver and provider needs to aid the creation of PSS Business Models at the PSS Conceptual Design stage.

Realising the affective potential of patents: a new model of database interpretation for user-centred design

ABSTRACT This research sets out a new interpretation of the patent database using affective design parameters. While this resource contains a vast quantity of technical information, its extraction and use in practical design settings is extremely challenging. Until now, all filing and subsequent landscaping or profiling of patents has been based on their technical characteristics. We set out an alternative approach that utilises crowdsourcing to first summarise patents and then applies text analysis tools to assess the summarising text in relation to three affective parameters: appearance, ease of use, and semantics. The results been used to create novel patent clusters that provide an alternative perspective on relevant technical data, and support user-centric engineering design. The workflow and tasks to effectively interface with the crowd are outlined, and the process for harvesting and processing responses using a combination of manual and computational analysis is reviewed. The process creates sets of descriptive words for each patent which differ significantly from those created using only functional requirements, and support a new paradigm for the use of big data in engineering design – one that utilises desirable affective qualities as the basis for scouring and presenting relevant functional patent information for concept generation and development.

Crowdsourcing solutions to 2D irregular strip packing problems from Internet workers

Many industrial processes require the nesting of 2D profiles prior to the cutting, or stamping, of components from raw sheet material. Despite decades of sustained academic effort, algorithmic solutions are still sub-optimal and produce results that can frequently be improved by manual inspection. However, the Internet offers the prospect of novel ‘human-in-the-loop’ approaches to nesting problems that uses online workers to produce packing efficiencies beyond the reach of current CAM packages. To investigate the feasibility of such an approach, this paper reports on the speed and efficiency of online workers engaged in the interactive nesting of six standard benchmark data-sets. To ensure the results accurately characterise the diverse educational and social backgrounds of the many different labour forces available online, the study has been conducted with subjects based in both Indian IT service (i.e. Rural BPOs) centres and a network of homeworkers in Northern Scotland. The results (i.e. time and packing efficiency) of the human workers are contrasted with both the baseline performance of a commercial CAM package and recent research results. The paper concludes that online workers could consistently achieve packing efficiencies roughly 4% higher than the commercial based-line established by the project. Beyond characterising the abilities of online workers to nest components, the results also make a contribution to the development of algorithmic solutions by reporting new solutions to the benchmark problems and demonstrating methods for assessing the packing strategy employed by the best workers.

Challenges and opportunities in transforming laser system industry to deliver integrated product and service offers

Laser system industry is a complex network entity that includes laser component manufacturer, laser manufacturer, system integrator, laser job shop, laser process developer and end product manufacturer. Currently this market segment is predominately product-centric in which the common business model is to sell laser systems with two years warranty. However increasing competition within this segment is forcing some stakeholders to go further than the existing business model, and aim to build long-standing relationship between others. In this paper, the current structure and level of servitization in laser industries, the implications of higher levels of servitization for the various stakeholders of the industry, and the opportunities to develop and deliver higher levels of servitization are discussed. Analyses of semi-structured interviews with managers of laser system manufacturer and laser job shops reveal that any servitized solutions would primarily require the transfer of capabilities between various stakeholders.

Computing the Incomputable with Human Processing Units

Initially commercial crowdsourcing services (such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) were focused largely on providing micro-labor services for tasks such as image labeling and text processing. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that these services can also be regarded as providing parallel, on-demand, networks of (so-called) ‘Human Processing Units’ (HPUs). Such services are able to provide specialist computational facilities in a manner analogous to the way Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) support the specialist process of high speed rendering. This paper describes how this new technology could extend the functionality of mechanical CAD/CAM or PLM systems. Crucial to the commercial feasibility of such systems is the ability to access networks of HPUs where engineering data can be processed securely (unlike open crowdsourcing sites such as mTurk). The paper reports the initial results of work done to establish the feasibility of a proposed architecture for integrating HPUs into desktop CAD that uses established BPO centers in rural India to provide a secure source of geometric intelligence.

The analysis and presentation of patents to support engineering design

This paper explores the role of patents in engineering design, and how the extraction and presentation of patent data could be improved for designers. We propose the use of crowdsourcing as a means to post tasks online for a crowd of people to participate and complete. The issues of assessment, searching, clustering and knowledge transfer are evaluated with respect to the literature. Opportunities for potential crowd intervention are then discussed, before the presentation of two initial studies. These related to the categorization and interpretation of patents respectively using an online platform. The initial results establish basic crowd capabilities in understanding patent text and interpreting patent drawings. This has shown that reasonable results can be achieved if tasks of appropriate duration and complexity are set, and if test questions are incorporated to ensure a basic level of understanding exists in the workers.