A Conceptual Framework for Integrated Product-Service Systems Eco-design
Abstract
Classical business economy is based on the sale of products. However, during the last decades, the increasing competition in the globalized economy and the resources rarefaction has led manufacturing companies in developed countries to re-orient their business towards integration of services in their product offers. The Product-Service System (PSS) concept is used to depict the resulting marketable set of products and services capable of jointly fulfilling a user’s need.PSS raise many interests for the reduction of the environmental pressure because they evolve the classical paradigm of mass production and consumption towards new mechanisms of value creation. In the PSS research field, a strong emphasis is put on their “potential” for decreasing the environmental impacts and on the necessity to design PSS as “integrated” sets of products and services. However, there is an important lack of effective support for PSS design and eco-design. This thesis aims at filling this gap by proposing a conceptual framework for PSS integrated eco-design. Its role is to support integration of products and services during PSS design until the most detailed phases by allowing communication between product engineers and service designers. A framework for PSS integrated design is proposed based on a system-based approach and allowing multi-views system modelling. An environmental evaluation framework is coupled to evaluate during design the environmental impacts generated over the PSS life cycle. The applicability of the conceptual framework is tested on an industrial case of a pneumatic energy delivery PSS.