An approach for choosing the cost effective design for a product-service system while maintaining its desired reliability

Abstract

With the spread of product-service systems as business models the life cycle costs are of increasing importance as a measurement of product cost. A key factor that drives these costs is the desired reliability of the products used to provide the service. Since the customer usually expects as uninterrupted service availability, it is imperative to achieve the the required reliability. Therefore a large variety of methods has been developed to maximize the reliability of a product. But these approaches focus on the maximization of the reliability and disregard the resulting product costs. This can lead to designs that over perform concerning their reliability requirements but also exceed their target costs. Which will result in the product-service system not being competitive in the marketplace or lowering the company's profit. This paper shows an approach on how to use markov chains to enable a quick comparison of life cycle costs from different product-service system designs With this it will be possible to make better informed decisions about the costs of a system while still meeting the reliability targets. © 2019 Design Society. All rights reserved.