Using MBSE for the Enhancement of Consistency and Continuity in Modular Product-Service-System Architectures

Within emerging markets, ensuring the competitiveness of manufacturing companies is crucial to their success. The integration of new business possibilities, such as Product-Service-Systems (PSS) can provide one suitable solution. Especially within the architecture development process, large amounts of interconnected data and data types need to be processed and versioned. This leads to a significant lack of data consistency and continuity along the development process of modular PSS architectures. This lack of consistency and continuity leads to a process being prone to errors, representing a significant negative impact onto the company’s value-added stream. We provide one possible solution to these issues by presenting a PSS architecture modularization approach based upon the modularization methods of the Integrated PKT-Approach. Using concepts of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) for modelling these architectures, automated and dynamic analyses of the architecture for the iteration and harmonization of the PSS architecture under development are enabled. The at first generically described approach is further detailed in the second part of this contribution by applying it to an industry case study for mobile laser welding systems. As a result, a clear support for the visualization of architecture iteration aspects as well as for the enhancement of data consistency and continuity is given.