An Integrated Design Framework for Virtual Enterprise-Based Customer-Oriented Product-Service Systems

Product Service System (PSS) design has been witnessed to achieve tremendous progress in recent years. Researchers and practitioners have proposed many frameworks to deal with variety of challenges along PSS lifecycle. However, despite the common sense of four fundamental constituent components of PSS-products, services, supported network and supported infrastructures, majority of them only focus on collaborative design of products and services, and few of them attach importance to supported network. The framework we proposed in this paper introduces the Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering (3DCE), which is widely recognized in product design field, into PSS design, in order to achieve the integrated product service offerings, processes and supported network design, hoping to bridge the gap of supported network design in a PSS. Meanwhile, this framework adopts Virtual Enterprise (VE) as a manifestation of supported network in order to provide the system with variety of skills, resources and supported infrastructures in an effective and dynamic way. What’s more, due to the increasing significances of customers, this framework takes both customers’ requirements and providers’ requirements into consideration, and is dedicated to address a win-win solution for both with the help of PSS design and assessment techniques.