Modeling and Simulation for the Operative Service Delivery Planning in the Context of Product-Service Systems

Accelerated with the developments in the context of Industry 4.0, a new trend has established itself in the manufacturing industry within the last two decades. Companies started to offer integrated solutions such as Product-Service Systems (PSS). While the provision of PSS enables benefits like business model innovation or strengthening competitiveness, the exploitation of these benefits depends heavily on the decisions in the operative service delivery planning. This, however, is a complex task due to the huge solution space. Analytical methods reach their limitations when trying to find the optimal solution. Though different optimization algorithms were elaborated for this problem, the evaluation of their solutions is overly simplified, and thus, their expressiveness for the uncertain and dynamic reality remains questionable. This paper addresses these issues by demonstrating the modeling of an adaptive simulation model that can be used to gain a realistic evaluation of operative service delivery plans in PSS.