Supporting Sustainable Product-Service System Implementation through Distributed Manufacturing

Abstract

Despite the potential of Product-Service Systems (PSS) to provide societal and economic well-being and environmental sustainability, they have not been widely implemented. The adoption of sustainable PSS is restricted by a number of implementation barriers linked to organisational, cultural and regulatory challenges. There are some initial yet still very fragmented attempts to support sustainable PSS development through the application of Distributed Manufacturing (DM). Distributed Manufacturing is a production network made of small scale manufacturing units equipped with emerging technologies, which facilitates localised customer-oriented production. This paper aims to fill the knowledge gap and identify the potential to build a systematic analysis for DM-supported PSS development. In order to understand to what extent DM can address some implementation barriers of sustainable PSS, existing PSS barriers and potential DM opportunities were collected. All DM opportunities were applied to each and every one PSS implementation barrier. Most promising pairings were described in initial scenarios. The implications from this research showed that a number of obstacles related to design, development and customer acceptance of PSS can be potentially tackled through the application of DM.