A Service Engineering procedure for the design and configuration of Product-Service Systems

The recent macro‐economic events have contributed to an increased awareness of the strategic relevance deriving from the provision of services related to products as an economic remedy for facing the sharp downfall of the markets. A relevant stream of literature, mainly rooted in the North-European research communities, has assigned an increasing emphasis to the role of Product-Service Systems (PSS) as a concrete response to these emerging pressures. The design and development of a PSS raises new issues, since the service component introduces further requirements than traditional product engineering. Compared to physical products, services are generally under-designed and inefficiently developed. In this context, purpose of this paper is to propose a Service Engineering systematic procedure to integrate the design capabilities of Service Explorer, a computer-aided modelling tool for Service Design developed at the Tokyo Metropolitan University, with a simulation test-bench which would enable the comparison of several PSS scenarios.