Modelling and simulation of functional product system availability and support costs

Functional Products (FP), total offers or product service systems that comprise of both Hardware (HW) and Support Services (SS) sold as an integrated offering under an availability guarantee are becoming increasing popular in industry. This paper addresses, through modelling and simulation the challenge faced by suppliers in developing an integrated HW and SS design to produce an FP which meets contracted availability. A recently published framework specified how an integrated model hardware and service support system model could be used to obtain functional availability predictions and perform simulation driven functional product development. This paper presents the first example of an integrated functional product model. It uses fault tree, Petri net and discrete event simulation techniques to enable the prediction of functional product availability and support costs. Such predictions are used here to evaluate and compare different service support system designs.