Nikoletta Boli

Resource Planning for the Installation of Industrial Product Service Systems

In product-oriented Industrial Product Service Systems (IPSSs) the customers benefit from the combination of a product which offers some functionalities and a set of services. IPSS supports the provision of services which can be offered by the product manufacturer. The services can offer a wide range of functionalities that can range from ensuring the product’s original functionality to augmenting the original functionality of the product. The shifting of a company to IPSS poses many challenges such as the changing of the company’s business model. One of the most important challenges for the establishment of IPSS is the appropriate planning of the resources for production, deployment, and installation into the customers’ site. However, companies that provide IPSS solutions are lacking the proper tools for resources’ planning in a dynamic environment. In this work, a multi-criteria resource planning method and tool for optimizing the production, delivery, and installation of IPSS is presented. The proposed solution generates alternative IPSS’s production and installation plans and evaluates them on performance measures for production and installation such as time and cost. Moreover, through the integration of the planning tool with the IPSS design phase, information for generating the Bill of Process and Materials is presented. The planning tool has been designed using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach and has been applied and validated in a pilot case from the laser cutting industry.

An approach for the modelling and quantification of PSS customisation

A Product–Service System (PSS) is a dynamic and multidimensional system that is comprised of products, services, a large network of stakeholders and all necessary supporting infrastructures, aiming towards becoming continuously competitive, satisfying customer needs and improving environmental aspects. The design of such a system and its evaluation throughout the lifecycle are challenging tasks owing to their inherent complexity, which becomes even greater when the aspect of customisation is considered. Nevertheless, the literature work regarding the customisation of PSS is scarce. Towards bridging this gap, the present work proposes a framework for PSS customisation, including the main steps that are required for a successful PSS customisation. For each step in the framework, which has been collected from the literature, PSS approaches have been provided, and could be used in the execution of each step. Next, the present study introduces a method for: (i) the modular representation of PSS based on vector analysis, and then (ii) the quantification of the PSS customisation degree.