The drivers in our economy are changing from production of material goods to product-service offers based on knowledge and information. A product-service system (PSS) is an integrated product and service offering that delivers value in use. In this new paradigm, products and services are designed to deliver the customer value rather than just the functionalities. One of the major objectives of PSS is to generate better overall revenue across the life cycle of a product. If designed appropriately, PSS solutions could also reduce overall resource consumption and environmental impact. Organisations that are going through this transition need to change their business model, processes and procedures, relationships with the customer and the supplier and the mindset of employees. The change is based on business-to-consumer or business-to-business interactions. Many traditionally product-oriented manufacturing organisations are going through this servitisation and are developing multidisciplinary practices to address the challenges.
This special issue of the Journal of Engineering Design presents state of the art in PSS development and design. There are five papers in the special issue focusing on the review of PSS development, PSS design methodologies to PSS design knowledge management. The issue starts with a review of the development of PSS by Isaksson et al. The paper presents a good account of the drivers for the change from traditional product to service development. The paper argues for an improved functional product development process and identifies challenges in the PSS development. The second paper by Maussang et al. proposes a PSS design methodology to support engineering designers. The tools and formalism used in the proposed methodology based on a function-oriented description and an activity-related description are also explained in the paper. The methodology allows the systematic development of physical product specifications that is consistent with the PSS architecture. The paper uses a combination of techniques to derive the specifications: functional analysis, functional block diagram-based representation and scenario analysis. The authors present a case study to validate the methodology. The next paper by Hara et al. reports a Service CAD for innovation. The authors described the service model implemented on the CAD software and demonstrated through an example. The paper extends the service blueprint from the marketing field to include product behaviour by using physical features from the engineering field. The framework illustrates the relationships between humanware, hardware and software in services. The fourth paper by Doultsonou et al. presents a framework to represent service knowledge for engineering designer access. A case study has been carried out to identify and classify service knowledge applied in practice, both in the service operation and in product design. This paper describes the service issues and service knowledge that has an impact on product design. The final paper by Moon et al. proposes an ontology-based representation for capture and reuse of service knowledge. Based on extending concepts from module-based product family design, this paper introduces a service ontology for representing services in a service family by integrating object-oriented concepts and ontologies. In summary, the five papers have presented an overview of the current challenges in the PSS design, research and a few directions for the future.
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