An integrated approach for rating engineering characteristics’ final importance in product-service system development

Product-service system (PSS) approach has emerged as a competitive strategy to impel manufacturers to offer a set of product and services as a whole. A three-domain PSS conceptual design framework based on quality function deployment (QFD) is proposed in this research. QFD is a widely used design tool considering customer requirements (CRs). Since both product and services influence satisfaction of customer, they should be designed simultaneously. Identification of the critical parameters in these domains plays an important role. Engineering characteristics (ECs) in the functional domain include product-related ECs (P-ECs) and service-related ECs (S-ECs). ECs are identified by translating customer requirements (CRs) in the customer domain. Rating ECs’ importance has a great impact on achieving an optimal PSS planning. The rating problem should consider not only the requirements of customer, but also the requirements of manufacturer. From the requirements of customer, the analytic network process (ANP) approach is integrated in QFD to determine the initial importance weights of ECs considering the complex dependency relationships between and within CRs, P-ECs and S-ECs. In order to deal with the vagueness, uncertainty and diversity in decision-making, the fuzzy set theory and group decision-making technique are used in the super-matrix approach of ANP. From the requirements of manufacturer, the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is applied to adjust the initial weights of ECs taking into account business competition and implementation difficulty. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed integrated approach for prioritizing ECs in PSS conceptual design.