Coping with the challenges of engineering smart product service systems - Demands for research infrastructure
Year: 2017
Editor: Anja Maier, Stanko Škec, Harrison Kim, Michael Kokkolaras, Josef Oehmen, Georges Fadel, Filippo Salustri, Mike Van der Loos
Author: Kuhlenkötter, Bernd; Bender, Beate; Wilkens, Uta; Abramovici, Michael; Göbel, Jens Christian; Herzog, Michael; Hypki, Alfred; Lenkenhoff, Kay
Series: ICED
Institution: Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
Section: Product, Services and Systems Design
Page(s): 341-350
ISBN: 978-1-904670-91-9
ISSN: 2220-4342
Abstract
Driven by innovations of information and communication technologies as well as increasingly demanding customer expectations on individualized products and services Smart Product Service Systems become success factors for any enterprise acting on a globalized market. Increasing product complexity on the one hand as well as flexible autonomous (re)configurations and adaptations throughout the entire product lifecycle on the other hand call for dedicated research methodologies on supporting the inter- and mulitdisciplinary engineering process. Active experimentation and simulation of typical Smart PSS lifecycle situations are key to developing new methodologies. The approach specifically fosters the integration of customers into all steps of the engineering process, which is again key to meeting the characteristically interdisciplinary requirements to Smart PSS. On this basis, the paper outlines the scientific concept of an Interdisciplinary Research Center on Engineering Smart Product Service Systems jointly funded by the federal government of Germany as well as the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Keywords: Product-Service Systems (PSS), Service design, Multi- / Cross- / Trans-disciplinary processes, Virtual Engineering (VE), Research methodologies and methods