Special Issue on Design of sustainable Product Service Systems and their Value Creation Chains

International audienceIndustrial Product Service Systems (PSS) are a new concept offering strong opportunities both for business innovation and sustainability improvement. Coupling or even integrating industrial production and service delivering poses many innovative challenges for the manufacturing industry at the technological, organizational and even human level. In the recent years, many international projects have contributed to important scientific advances in the field. Product Service Systems offer innovative opportunities of value creation for the industry. Opening new possibilities of extracting value from the usage phase of product-life cycle for the users/customers, for the providers and for various stakeholders, IPS2 bring new economic and business models, but also a deep change in the production models of the industry. A heated controversy concerns the sustainable impact of such innovations: IPS2 are often considered as a potential lever to improve life cycle management, but the business reality tends to reduce IPS2 to a set of processes aiming at increasing profits. The potential of value creation brought by Product Service Systems strongly depends on the way they are designed and engineered within the industry: this is the focus of the special issue.The Special issue aims at gathering a state of the art on latest advances on models, methods, and tools developed in order to support the design and engineering of Product Service Systems and their associated value creation chains. This covers the various dimensions which can contribute to design, configure and evaluate both the PSS offer itself, but also the servitized logistic and production chain required to deliver it: Usage capture and customer analysis; Evaluation of PSS performance, value creation and sustainability; Modelling formalisms and methods to support PSS engineering; Decision-making approaches for PSS configuration; Engineering Methodologies for PSS; Lean engineering and management of PSS, etc…The special issue is open both to PSS Case Studies, thus more oriented on applied research, and theoretical contributions participating to the progressive formalization of a scientific and structured knowledge for this multidisciplinary domain