Abstract
Product service systems (PSS) are bundles of physical technological elements and service elements that are integrated to solve customer problems. In practice, most components of PSS are developed independently from each other, which leads to problems with coordination of development activities and integration of PSS components. Therefore, an integrated requirements engineering for PSS is needed that deals with the involvement of developers from product engineering, software engineering, and service engineering, as well as the inherent complexity of the PSS and the development process. In a case study with the development department of a PSS provider, we analyzed requirements documents and conducted expert interviews. We identified problems in the development, for example, that requirements on different levels of abstraction are intermingled, rationales for requirements are missing, and the concretization of requirements is unclear. To solve these problems, we propose a requirements data model (RDMod) for requirements to PSS. An RDMod describes different types of requirements and the relations between them. Thus, it is a scheme for the concretization of the requirements, which especially addresses the problems of structuring the requirements, enabling traceability, and finding conflicts. We then used an analytical evaluation, a feature-based evaluation and a retrospective application with requirements analysts of the industry partner. In a joint workshop, we specified requirements for a PSS with the RDMod. In structured interviews, we analyzed the perceived advantages of the RDMod. The experts confirmed that the RDMod is applicable in their development and it provides a clear structure for the requirements and therefore helps overcoming the identified problems.
Highlights
Today’s marketplace is characterized as being demanddriven, where the demand of the customer determines the supply of the companies [1, 2]
We describe the development of the requirements data model (RDMod), where we show the current state and challenges that appeared in the case study, derive requirements from that and formulate a structure of the RDMod
It was stated by the interviewees that the RDMod for product service systems (PSS) was well suited to structure requirements and supported the stakeholders during the coordination of the requirements
Summary
Today’s marketplace is characterized as being demanddriven, where the demand of the customer determines the supply of the companies [1, 2]. Customers require comprehensive solutions to their problems instead of defined products or services Companies offer these customers solutions provided as integrated bundles of hardware, software, and services known as product service systems (PSS) or hybrid products [2, 3]. A major challenge constitutes the different expectations and understandings of stakeholders with regard to product requirements Customers express their needs ambiguously, and the requirements are defined in a solution-neutral way. There is often a lack of traceability among the single requirements ensuring that the concrete, solution-oriented requirements satisfy the goals of the customer [5, 6] Another deficit represents the conceptual gap between the RE and different development activities that need to be closed [7]
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