Life cycle cost impact of maintenance networks for product-service system fleets

Abstract

When operating a product-service system that contains multiple products that supply service to customers, it is necessary to maintain those products to ensure operability. Therefore the product-service system operator has to provide a maintenance network capable of performing those maintenance actions. These maintenance networks have interdependencies with the design of the physical product, meaning that changes in either one can make characteristics of the other impossible or enable them. Thus it is necessary to evaluate how the differences in maintenance networks impact the possibilities for product design and the costs of the entire product-service system. Consequently this paper analyses the possible differences between different maintenance networks, which have an impact on the physical product or are impacted by it. One such difference is the mean travel time to the next maintenance location which can be impacted by the size and/or weight of the physical product. While in this case the changes in the physical product only rarely make the travel to the next maintenance location impossible the transportation time and cost are always impacted. These Interdependencies are identified and recorded in the form of a matrix which indicates how they interact with each other. Furthermore their impact on the life cycle costs on the entire fleet of product-service systems is analyzed and formalized. With this it is possible to give recommendations on the design of future product-service system and whether a change in physical product or maintenance network is better for the overall life cycle costs.