Toward a reference terminology for product-service systems in the manufacturing domain

Abstract

Recently, products and services have become joint commodities, in contrast to the traditional focus on products alone. Thus, modern industrial companies need to manage product-service systems (PSSs) as part of a competitive strategy. PSSs are comprised of complex, related products and services; stakeholders; processes; and environments. It is therefore important to identify, integrate, and manage information from different data-sources. This paper introduces the critical issues facing PSSs and provides reference terminology for PSSs in the form of an ontology. This ontology represents a generic PSS that not only adds value to the PSS design but also offers the potential to improve individual products and services in the system. Thus, in this paper, we aim to facilitate communication between stakeholders from different domains and integrate heterogeneous data from various data-sources during the PSS lifecycle. As a result, our paper supports the design and delivery of PSS components by providing a generic PSS ontology for the manufacturing domain, and a glossary of entities, with concrete, unambiguous definitions. The research that led to the development of the proposed generic PSS ontology resulted from the collaboration of several academic and industrial partners in two EU projects: DIVERSITY and FALCON.