Agent-Based Modelling for Assessing the Economic and Environmental Sustainability of PSS

Manufacturing companies are marketing business offerings to customers based on integrated product and service packages – Product-Service Systems (PSS) to remain competitive. While PSS offerings allow foreseeing economical benefits for customers and manufacturers, the sustainability assessment of PSS has not been extensively studied in the literature. While it is recognized that sustainability can be evaluated under the three dimensions of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) – i.e., economic, environmental, and social – existing assessment methods usually concentrate on only one, neglecting the interplay with the other two. Thus, a more comprehensive method for evaluating PSS sustainability is required. This paper proposes the use of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) as a method for jointly assessing the economic and environmental sustainability of PSS offerings. The social dimension is not considered since the research about the impacts of PSS offering is still at its beginning, as a consequence of the difficulties in finding common social sustainability indicators. The proposed approach overcomes the limitations of traditional sustainability assessment methods by allowing for dealing with the stochastic nature of reality, testing multiple scenarios, and understanding the impacts of PSS solutions on the economic and environmental sustainability in the long-term perspective.