Ontological Descriptions for Integrating Design Information of Product-Service Systems

Abstract

Product-service systems (PSS), which create value by integrating physical products and services, have received much attention as a promising option to increase manufacturers’ revenue and reduce environmental impact. The process of designing a PSS requires collaboration among various experts who use domain-specific knowledge. Therefore, several researches have been investigated for developing design tools tailored to their expertise. However, while the specialization of design tools can be useful for experts, it hinders companies from ensuring the integrity of design information in different design elements. This results in the failure in achieving expected benefits. To address these issues, this study applies the concept of interoperability to PSS design to integrate design information from different domains. In particular, ontological descriptions is adopted to achieve semantic interoperability in different design elements. The application of the proposed ontology to a lecture on PSS design highlights that the proposed method is effective for integrating information on PSS design elements and those between value creation and capture.