Prioritizing Engineering Characteristics of Product-Service System Using Analytic Network Process and Data Envelopment Analysis

Product-service system (PSS) approach has emerged as a competitive strategy to impel manufacturers to offer a set of products and services as a whole. A new three-domain PSS conceptual design framework supporting engineering design methodology is proposed in this research. Identification of the critical parameters in these domains plays an important role. Engineering characteristics (ECs) in the functional domain, which include product-related ECs (P-ECs) and service-related ECs (S-ECs), are identified by translating customer requirements (CRs) in the customer domain. Quality function deployment (QFD) is used to implement this translation process. Prioritizing ECs is a crucial issue in achieving the optimal PSS planning. First, to consider complex dependency relationships between and within CRs, P-ECs and S-ECs, the analytic network process (ANP) approach is integrated in QFD to determine the initial importance weights of ECs. Second, the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is applied to adjust the initial weights of ECs considering requirements of the manufacturers. In order to deal with the vagueness, uncertainty and diversity in decision-making, the fuzzy set theory and group decision-making technique are used in the supermatrix approach of ANP in the first phase. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed prioritizing approach for ECs in PSS conceptual design.