Product Service System Working Group

IOF Product Service System Working Group

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Overview and Purpose

The Product Service System (PSS) working group (WG) aims to create a reference ontology for enhancing engineering and management of PSS in manufacturing, by modelling all the aspects that affect, or could affect a PSS.

In this group the understanding is that a Product–Service System (PSS) meets customer needs by combining physical products with services that make those products usable, reliable, and valuable over time. Services play a key role by ensuring that the product works properly, is maintained, upgraded when needed, and lasts longer. Depending on the agreement, the customer may own the product and pay for services that support its use and performance, or the provider may keep ownership and offer the product as a service, allowing the customer to pay for access, use, or results rather than the product itself. Such a PSS often has a lower environmental impact than other business models[1].

The PSS WG started its cooperation using as a basis the work done by ATB and EPFL in the scope of the two European Union (EU) projects Diversity (for ATB) and Falcon (for EPFL). The objectives of the Diversity and Falcon use cases were to provide a common reference point for PSS engineering in discrete manufacturing, for cooperation between the different stakeholders, in order to facilitate semantic modelling of information and increase the adaptability of software tools to the constant changing needs of the users. These objectives were reinforced since then to support Product Service Systems from the Design and Use, up to the End of Life phases.

As a part of the IOF, the PSS WG continually updates its material and its ontology development process from the collective results of the IOF community. The initial set of provisionally released terms considered by the WG (see https://github.com/iofoundry/ontology) includes:/p>

  • Product Service System
  • Commercial Service
  • Material Product
  • Facility
  • Product Service System Business Process
  • Product Service System Supplier and Consumer
  • Product Family

Leadership

Related Resources

  • Ana Correia, Dragan Stokic, Rebecca Siafaka, Sebastian Scholze (2017), Ontology for Collaborative Development of Product Service Systems Based on Basic Formal Ontology, ICE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation, June 27-29, 2017, Madeira, Portugal.
  • Gökan May, Sangje Cho, Ana Teresa Correia, Rebecca Siafaka, Dragan Stokic, Dimitris Kiritsis (2022) "Toward a reference terminology for product-service systems in the manufacturing domain", in Computers in Industry, Volume 142, 2022, 103729, ISSN 0166-3615, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2022.103729.
  • Correia, A., Stokic, D. (2024). Role of Ontology in Data-Driven PSS Engineering and Design and Lifecycle Management. In: Pezzotta, G., Sala, R., Boucher, X., Bertoni, M., Pirola, F. (eds) Data-Driven Decision Making for Product Service Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60082-1_3.

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[1] Mont, Oksana K. “Clarifying the concept of product–service system.” Journal of cleaner production 10.3 (2002): 237-245