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The rapid development and implementation of smart, connected products have triggered a promising manufacturing paradigm of servitization, i.e. smart product-service systems (Smart PSS). Unlike existing product development or service design process, Smart PSS owns the unique design characteristics of IT-driven value co-creation, closed-loop design, and context-awareness enabled by the advanced information and communication technologies. Nevertheless, to the best of authors' knowledge, there is scarcely any discussion on its design theories, which serves as the fundamental basis. To identify the limitations of current design approaches in supporting Smart PSS development and suggest some future research directions, this paper conducts a systematic literature review at existing engineering design methodologies to verify its appropriateness for the Smart PSS development. 9 typical design methods have been chosen based on the systematic review of 101 representative items published ever since the coin of PSS to date (04/05/2020) and 48 supplementary works. They are further compared and evaluated from three aspects, including "smart design" objects, enabling smart technologies and smart application fields. Not surprisingly, the investigation results indicate that none of the existing methodologies can fully meet the design characteristics of Smart PSS, while three research directions of Smart PSS design methodology are provided as the potential solution at last. It is hoped this paper can attract more open discussions and offer useful insights to both academics and industries in their development of Smart PSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart product-service systems (Smart PSS), as an emerging digital servitization paradigm, leverages smart, connected products and their generated services as a solution bundle to meet individual customer needs. Owing to the advanced information and communication technologies, Smart PSS development differs from the existing product and/or service design mainly in three aspects: (1) closed-loop design/redesign iteration; (2) value co-creation in the context; and (3) design with context-awareness. These unique characteristics bring up new design challenges, and to the authors' best knowledge, none of the existing design theories can address them well. Aiming to fill this gap, a novel design methodology for the Smart PSS development is proposed based on the information theory, where both the system and stakeholders can be regarded as the information containers. Hence, the closed-loop design/redesign iteration can be treated as the dynamic change of information and entropy in a balanced ecosystem. Meanwhile, the value co-creation process is considered as the exchange of accumulated information via the container. Lastly, the design context-awareness represents the process of reducing entropy. As a novel prescriptive design theory, it follows Shannon's information theory to determine the best design/redesign solutions by considering the three characteristics integrally. It is hoped that the proposed design entropy theory can largely facilitate today's Smart PSS development with better performance and user satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the trend of 'digitalization' and 'servitization' in the manufacturing industry, numerous product-service systems fail to seize a market share and encounter an imbalance between digital investments and expected revenues. This phenomenon is probably caused by the insufficient evaluation on user experience and by the lag between user requirement changes and the offered solutions. Both limitations can be mitigated via automatic Smart PSS evaluation based on broader concerns on user experience information that was collected from either product-service bundles or user behavior. In this paper, a context-aware concept evaluation approach is proposed for Smart PSS design iteration, aiming to satisfy users in a more timely and automatic manner. Derived from the conventional information axiom method, the proposed approach introduces a context-aware evaluation indicator identification module and an automatic system range identification procedure based on natural language processing techniques, and eventually return the most robust concepts during the usage phase. With less human intervention in the design process, it relieves the lag between user requirement changes and the solutions, and reduces the prescriptive instructions in the conventional information axiom method. A case study of a 3D printer company's design iteration is conducted, which proves the proposed approach's feasibility. It is hoped that this work provides practical guidance for achieving a more context-aware Smart PSS development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual reality (VR) has been applied in many different sectors, including manufacturing and engineering industries as well as in the healthcare industry where VR-equipped health products can provide better prevention, rehabilitation, and palliative care in a user-friendly environment. The smart product-service system (PSS) aims to achieve better user experience and higher user satisfaction. Limited research has been conducted on the benefits of leveraging advanced VR systems in a sustainable smart PSS via analysis of human factors. Moreover, existing VR research lacks the systematic methods that fully consider user performance and experience in a smart manner. This study aims to outline a conceptual approach for user-centric development of value-added smart PSSs based on VR, and to develop a case study with a smart VR rowing machine to illustrate the proposed approach and to verify its feasibility and effectiveness. After the VR platform is created, user-generated and VR system-generated data are collected and processed. The value-added services of VR-assisted user experience and real-time data feedback can be achieved. The results of this ergonomic experiment were determined by jointly considering the user-generated and VR system-generated data. They showed that the developed smart VR rowing machine significantly enhanced the user experience. The value-added services of VR-assisted user experience and real-time data feedback have been achieved. Theoretically, the proposed conceptual framework for a VR-assisted, user-centric, smart PSS provides an approach of specific data-driven and value-added services compared to traditional methods since it simultaneously considers user-generated and VR system-generated data. In the practical smart PSS design of VR products, this paper contributes to the design methodology of VR products and value-added services to obtain more accurate and objective user experience. It is hoped that this study can offer insightful guidance to enterprises that are involved in the process of creating the value-added design and service based on VR. • A user-centric framework for the value-added design of smart PSS using VR is proposed. • The case of a smart VR rowing machine is illustrated to verify the effectiveness of the design methodology. • Objective physiological data of the users are used to evaluate user experience. • User-generated and system-generated data can further support the solution design and improve user experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]