Collaborative on-demand product-service systems customization lifecycle

Product-Service Systems (PSS) are being revolutionized into smart, connected products, which changes the industrial and technological landscape and unlocks unprecedented opportunities. The intelligence that smart, connected products embed paves the way for more sophisticated data gathering and analytics capabilities ushering in tandem a new era of smarter supply and production chains, smarter production processes, and even end-to-end connected manufacturing ecosystems. This vision imposes a new technology stack and lifecycle models to support and capacitate smart, connected products and services.

The main contribution of this article is a novel PSS customization lifecycle methodology with underpinning technological solutions that enable collaborative on-demand PSS customization by supporting companies to evolve their product-service offerings by transforming them into smart, connected products. This is facilitated by the proposed lifecycle through formalized knowledge-intensive structures and associated IT tools that provide the basis for actionable PSS and production “intelligence” and a move toward more fact-based manufacturing decisions. The basic building blocks of the proposed PSS customization lifecycle and its technological stack are implemented in an integrated tool-suite and validated via large-scale industrial case studies. The PSS customization lifecycle described in this paper, paves the way for a new direction in highly-connected, knowledge-enabled smart factories, where devices, production equipment, production processes, and human-operators are connected, offering decision-making support on the basis of production knowledge and data.