Engineering PSS (Product/Service Systems) Toward Sustainability:Review of Research

Abstract

This chapter gives a review of research on PSS (product/service system) and its relation to environmental sustainability. The focus of this chapter is on engineering, especially design, of PSS. It first explains why PSS gains attention from the sustainability and business viewpoints and then moves on to what PSS is. One definition of PSS is “a marketable set of products and services capable of jointly fulfilling a user’s needs.” Importantly, from the engineering viewpoint, service is beginning to be increasingly incorporated into the design space, an area which has been traditionally dominated by physical products in manufacturing industries.In relation to environmental sustainability, PSS is argued to have potential for decreasing environmental impacts in many cases. Among others, the “functional result” type is regarded as the most promising. However, PSS is not always environmentally superior to its reference offering based on product sales.From the viewpoint of design, introduced are three dimensions of PSS design: the offering, the provider, and the customer/user dimensions. In principle, any PSS design is supposed to address at least part of all the three dimensions since service includes the activities of customers and providers. Then, this chapter will guide readers to the works on modeling, designing, and evaluating PSS with emphasis on the differences to traditional product design. In sum, PSS design is design toward value of stakeholders by utilizing various alternatives – either product or service. This means that PSS design provides designers with new degrees of freedom and covers an earlier phase of design that is not addressed in design of pure physical product. The latter further implies the importance of information to be available in design about product usage or service delivery. For modeling and design, some examples of methods for supporting PSS design are introduced.In the end, the author’s recognition of important industrial challenges and research issues about PSS are described based on the experiences of the author’s group. They are from various areas such as business model development, marketing and sales, R&D and PSS development, (re)manufacturing, service delivery, supply chain management, organizational and managerial topic, and energy and material consumption.