Planning the variety of product service systems offers

Complexity oriented decision model based on evolutionary algorithms

Under the requirement of the best return rate within product service systems, the aim of the project is to develop a decision model for planing procedures of PPS.

The increasing individualisation of customer demands and the control of company internal complexity are central challenges regarding the price competition in globalised markets. At the same time, the variety of product service system offers has to be organised in such a way that the company internal complexity and therefore the financial costs remain in control.

However, companies currently only have a limited overview of the offered program diversity and the resulting complexity and financial costs.

Approaches regarding a possible organisation and optimisation of the variety of product service system offers are lacking. Because of the complex connections between the provision of products and services and the special characteristics of services, it is not possible to simply take existing approaches regarding the theory of complexity management for products (especially the cost estimation) and use them for services.

Because of this, it is the goal of the DFG-funded research project „planning the variety of product service system offers” to develop an integrated model, which brings together a market-sided description of the benefit of a large variety and a clear description of costs. Thus, it allows to make solid decisions on the optimal variety of service programs offer.