Context sensitive collaborative product service system development environment

Abstract

Manufacturing companies today instead of selling classical products turn more to offer Product Service Systems (PSS). The development of PSS in manufacturing industry requires intensive collaboration among various actors across the value chain. Innovative collaborative ICT environment including sets of advanced tools allowing for effective PSS development are needed. Enormous amount of knowledge to be gathered and shared under dynamically changing conditions, and diffused to a wide spectrum of actors involved, having different expertise and working conditions/cultures, asks for effective context sensitive solutions for knowledge capturing, analysis and diffusion. The paper presents a novel approach for context sensitivity of tools to support collaborative PSS development. The proposed solution is one of the first attempts to provide holistic methodology and set of software services allowing for context sensitivity of diverse PSS engineering tools. The context model based on ontology and the set of services for context monitoring and extraction are specified and developed. The application of the proposed solution in machine industry for collaborative PSS development is discussed.