Which Representation for Sets of Product and Associated Services during the Design Process

Since a couple of years, services are taking more and more importance beside the physical products. The market is shifting from selling product to providing utility. The Product-Service System(PSS) is an emergent concept that promotes the embedding of services with product. But the inclusion of services within the product will add some modifications to the design process of the product. Consequently, to encourage enterprises to create PSS, it is important to have during the design process of these sets a common representation of product and services. In this article, the PSS principle will be explained. Then, a PSS case study will be represented with two different representations. One is Agent-Based Model which has been developed in Service/Product Engineering and Functional Analysis. It will be discussed which one could be the more adapted for PSS in order to help and guide designers.