Study On Methods And Technologies For Customer Requirement-oriented Design Of Product-service Concept

With the increasing competition and diversification of customer demand, lowvalue-added manufacturing sector has been unable to meet the requirements of market andenvironment, which leads to gradual profit decline of manufacturing company. In order toachieve sustainable growth and profitability, many manufacturers begin to transit fromproduct manufacturers to providers of industrial product-service (IPS). They providehigh-value service solutions based on product to meet diversified and personalizedrequirements. This can help to achieve rational use of resources, reducing environmentpollution and increasing social employment, etc. However, the current research on industrialproduct-service (also referred to as product-service) still focuses on the theoretical area ofproduct-service definition, service strategy, and service business model, etc. There is lack ofeffective design techniques and methods for design of industrial product-service, which willhinder the successful implementation of service transformation strategy of manufacturingindustry. Therefore, focusing on the key issues of industrial product-service design, thisdissertation carries out the following research points based on analysis of past research andadvanced industry practice.(1) Conceptual design framework for product-service. Based on the definition of relatedconcepts, a systematic framework for industrial product-service design is proposed. Thedesign processes and key technologies to support the framework are also developed whichwill provide specific guidance and reference for the designers of IPS.(2) Identification and analysis of customer requirement for product-service. To acquire customer service requirements comprehensively, a customer requirement identificationmethod based on Industrial Customer Activity Cycle (I-CAC) is proposed, which is used toanalyze the activities and stakeholders’ interactions before, during and after product usingphase. To provide accurate inputs for subsequent design activities, an importance analysismethod for customer requirement based on rough group AHP is provided. The method canwell manipulate the subjective decision-making process of requirement importance analysisand reduce the adverse effects of ambiguity and uncertainty.(3) Requirements conversion and resolution of service technical attributes’ conflicts.Service technical attributes are obtained from scene graph of functional properties. Then, tomap customer requirements with service technical attributes and reduce uncertainties inconversion process, an improved service house of quality based on rough gray relationanalysis is proposed. A method for identifying service technical attributes’ conflicts isproposed, which is based on mixed-language decision-making with multi-granularity. Also, toefficiently resolve potential design conflicts and reduce randomness in the process of conflictresolution, standard services attributes, conflict resolution matrix for product-service andservice inventive principles are also developed.(4) Modularization of product-service. Service components are identified based on theproposed method of industrial product-service blueprint. With the identified servicecomponents, different service module schemes are generated based on fuzzy tree graph theory.A Fuzzy TOPSIS based on integrated weights is proposed to evaluate different service moduleschemes to select the most reasonable one, which would enhance the efficiency ofproduct-service design.(5) Concept selection and configuration optimization for products-service. To obtainoptimized solution set of configured IPS concept, a multi-objective optimization model isestablished for configuration of IPS, which is solved with improved non-dominated sortinggenetic algorithm. A service concept evaluation method based on rough TOPSIS is proposedto select the configured products-service concept that best meet personalized customerrequirements. The method is expected to enhance IPS provider’s ability to quickly meetcustomer requirements with lower cost.This dissertation firstly validates feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methods and techniques with the case of compressor service in each chapter. Then, to furthersystematically validate commonality of the proposed methods, they are then applied intodesign of elevator service. The validation results reveal that this study can provide referencefor the design of industrial product-service.