A Design Tool to Apply Distributed Manufacturing Principles to Sustainable Product-Service System Development

Abstract

The Product-Service System (PSS) concept is considered a promising type of business models that has the potential to couple social, economic and environmental sustainability. However, there are a number of organisational, cultural and regulatory barriers that hinder a wide PSS implementation. The research hypothesis of this paper is that Distributed Manufacturing (DM), described as a network of localised and customer-oriented production units, can be applied to PSS to address some of the previously mentioned barriers. In order to understand to what extent DM can improve PSS implementation, existing PSS barriers were gathered and coupled with collected potential DM opportunities. Most promising pairings were described in a set of nearfuture scenarios which were later integrated into the first version of the PSS+DM design tool. The first testing of the tool was carried out with 45 design students and initial findings suggest that, with further improvements, the PSS+DM design tool has the potential to support PSS solutions development process.