Requirements definition for the economic, environmental and social sustainability assessment of Product-Service Systems: State-of-the-art

Nowadays the adoption of Product-Service Systems (PSS) has emerged as a pivotal strategy for enhancing competitiveness while reducing environmental and social impacts. This shift mirrors a larger trend in manufacturing companies to focus more on sustainability by selling services rather than products. However, assessing PSS sustainability presents complex challenges, and this study aims to define the key requirements for a comprehensive assessment to support sustainable value creation. This is addressed by undertaking a systematic literature review focused on existing methods and methodologies for evaluating PSS sustainability, emphasizing economic, environmental, and social dimensions, the nature of the indicators included for the sustainability evaluation, and the assessment purpose. The analysis reveals a lack of a common approach, including the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), in PSS evaluation that can support the generation of sustainable added value for PSS models. The thematic analysis highlights several assessment challenges related to the multidimensional nature of PSS. In this direction, key requirements for a comprehensive sustainability assessment are defined, and they include the adoption of life cycle perspective, the inclusion of stochastic elements of life cycles, an extension of the sustainability assessment to smart PSS, a broader ecosystem perspective and the system view on the TBL. The key requirements obtained from the analysis also provide reflections for future research directions for academics and practitioners alike.