Explore and evaluate innovative value propositions for smart product service system: A novel graphics-based rough-fuzzy DEMATEL method

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.118672Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A new topic on innovative value propositions (IVPs) of smart PSS is put forward.

  • A systematic exploration of IVPs from perspective of ecosystem is conducted.

  • A new graphics-based rough-fuzzy DEMATEL is proposed to evaluate IVPs.

  • Integrated rough-fuzzy number is applied to manipulate intra-/inter-personal uncertainty.

  • Showed the method’s feasibility, accuracy and potentials with smart vehicle PSS.

Abstract

The rapid development of advanced information and communication technology enables the mainstream trend of manufacturing value propositions towards smart product service system (PSS). Prospect innovative value propositions (IVPs) emerge in the context of smart PSS. The IVPs analysis plays a critical role in the successful planning and design of smart PSS business model, which includes two key steps: identification and evaluation. However, the existing research rarely systematically explore what value propositions can be identified in the emerging field of smart PSS. Thus, this study conducts a comprehensive IVPs identification through literature review and prioritize these IVPs to provide support for later smart PSS concept design. Compared to other evaluation methods, the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) presents higher effectiveness to evaluate the interrelationship and importance degree of the identified IVPs. Moreover, the previous fuzzy-based DEMATEL is feasible to handle intrapersonal uncertainty (individual linguistic vagueness), and the previous rough-based DEMATEL can effectively manipulate the interpersonal uncertainty (group preference diversity). Nevertheless, there are few researches on simultaneous manipulation of the two kinds of uncertainty which may lead to inaccurate evaluation results. Therefore, this study develops a novel graphics-based rough-fuzzy DEMATEL method for IVPs evaluation. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed evaluation method are illustrated through the application in the smart vehicle service system and the comparisons with several different methods. The proposed evaluation model can provide more accurate and informative results, because it integrates the merits of fuzzy set in coping with the intrapersonal uncertainty and the strength of rough set in handling interpersonal uncertainty, and supports to present decision inconsistency along with the final weights based on a proposed graphics-based operator.

Introduction

The rapid development of advanced smart technologies (e.g. Cyber-Physical System (CPS), Internet-of-Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI)) have triggered a prospective smart connected product (SCP) market (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014), and thus enables the mainstream trend of manufacturing value proposition towards smart product-service systems (PSS) (Valencia et al., 2015). Smart PSS is first defined as a bundle of SCP and the generated smart services by leveraging SCP as the media and tool, which is delivered to market for satisfying personalized needs of customers as well as providing more environmental and social benefits (Valencia et al., 2015). In context of Internet-of-Everything (IoX), large quantities of data are produced from SCPs’ operation lifecycle, and ultimately converted to smart data-driven value creation through various analytic techniques (Rymaszewska et al., 2017). It has drawn incremental attention from academia and practice due to its potential for enhancing manufacturers’ competitive strength (Ardolino et al., 2018), improving customer satisfaction (Liu et al., 2019; Zheng et al., 2019), and promoting value emergence of industrial ecosystem (Siow et al., 2018; Tao et al., 2018), etc.

The boundary of value system for Smart PSS has been expanded to a broader scope compared to traditional PSS. Prosperous innovative value propositions (IVPs) emerge in the connection between SCPs to SCPs, SCPs to users, SCPs to environment, SCPs to infrastructure, SCPs to activity, etc., for the smart technology-enabled PSS (Javed et al., 2018; Li et al., 2017; Siegel et al., 2018). In this respect, the value propositions boundary for smart PSS has been extended from the traditional product use lifecycle to the whole industrial ecosystem. This extension not only triggers more value or business opportunities but also brings with challenges for business model orientation in the transformation towards service-oriented manufacturing (Ardolino et al., 2018; Rymaszewska et al., 2017). Also, the identification of appropriate value propositions plays a critical role in the successful planning and design of smart PSS business model (Bertoni et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2019). However, as an emerging field, the previous works rarely discuss its value innovation aspects. The identification of IVPs is a challenging task for smart PSS (Zheng et al., 2018) and there is no systematic summary of the IVPs that occur in context of smart PSS in previous studies. The first issue of this study is identified as follows:

Research issue I: What kinds of value propositions can be identified and elicited for smart PSS with the application and convergence of smart technologies?

Thus, it is necessary to take systematic exploration on the IVPs for smart PSS. Corresponding to the multiple connections between included smart components in smart PSS, this study conducted a comprehensive review on the IVPs from a systematic perspective. This explorative review is first to present the panorama of the various value propositions by surveying the related past literatures. A novel classification framework is proposed to understand the insights of innovative value system, and provide a structured configuration for evaluating the IVPs for smart PSS.

Since the selection and evaluation of value propositions provide significant guidance for configuring the value scope of a specific smart PSS (Wang and Ming, 2018), it is crucial to apply suitable method to assess and acquire an optimized cluster of PSS value propositions (Sakao and Lindahl, 2012). The DEMATEL method has been acknowledged as a more effective and feasible technique (Si et al., 2018) to assess PSS value propositions in terms of the effect-causal relation (Mardani et al., 2015) compared with other approaches (Mourtzis et al., 2016; Qu et al., 2016), e.g. AHP/ANP, Important-Performance Analysis (IPA), DEA, etc. Nevertheless, IVPs evaluation involves two types of inherent uncertainty (Wu and Mendel, 2010): intrapersonal uncertainty caused by person’s vagueness in thinking and expressing preferences (Liu et al., 2019), and interpersonal uncertainty associated with the variations and diversity among judgments of different persons (Li et al., 2019). Fuzzy set theory and rough set theory have been widely alone applied into the DEMATEL-based approach to manipulate the intrapersonal and interpersonal uncertainty respectively. However, most of the previous studies have not simultaneously handled intrapersonal and interpersonal uncertainty at the same time. In addition, in previously developed fuzzy set-based or rough set-based DEMATEL, the inconsistency among group decision-makers (DMs) has not been measured and presented at the final evaluation results. The second research issue of this study is recognized as follows:

Research issue II: How to fully handle and measure the intrapersonal and interpersonal uncertainty when evaluating casual interrelationship and priority of IVPs for smart PSS?

Therefore, to solve the second research issue, a novel graphics-based rough-fuzzy DEMATEL method is developed by combing the fuzzy set, rough set, graphics-based approach, and DEMATEL technique to evaluate the interrelationship and priority of the IVPs which are identified and selected from the literature review results. Also the proposed evaluation method can present the prominence-relation and weight-consistency performance among the IVPs. The proposed method integrates the merits of fuzzy set in coping with the intrapersonal uncertainty and the strength of rough set in handling interpersonal uncertainty. In addition, the presented method keeps the uncertainty information through the whole computing process, performing rough-fuzzy relation among IVPs and inconsistency degree with the final weights of IVPs.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews some literatures concerning smart PSS, IVPs and DEMATEL-based evaluation methods in PSS field. Section 3 proposes a graphics-based rough-fuzzy DEMATEL method for IVP evaluation. Section 4 apply the proposed method in a smart vehicle service system and conducts several comparisons with some similar methods. Section 5 presents the theoretical and practical implications of this study. Section 6 illustrates the conclusions and suggestions.

Section snippets

Smart PSS and innovative value propositions

Smart PSS was first defined by Valencia et al. (2015), in which smart services is produced by leveraging SCP as the media and tool. Chowdhury et al. (2018) figured that smart PSS is smart technology-enabled product service system regarded as a value system driven by digital resource, and a business model that is crossing digital boundary objects. Zheng et al. (2018) stated a Cyber-physical System (CPS) structure of Smart PSS that is IoX-platform-based, data-driven and digital-twins enabled, in

Mathematical preliminaries

Since the proposed methodology integrates the fuzzy set theory and rough set theory for respectively manipulating intrapersonal and interpersonal uncertainty, this section introduces some basic features of triangular fuzzy number (TFN), the transformation between linguistic variables and TFNs, and extended rough set based on TFN.

Case study

In this section, the IVPs evaluation of smart vehicle service system (SVSS) is taken as an example for this study. Vehicle Manufacturer M is a Fortune 500 company that specializes in delivering various types of vehicles and related services, including passenger and commercial vehicles. M company is paying more and more attention to sell services of smart connected vehicles (SCVs). The company develop a Smart Connected Vehicle Platform to connect and monitor the sold SCVs. A large amount of

Theoretical implications

This study contributes to comprehensively explore IVPs of smart PSS, and develop a novel evaluation method for obtaining priority and casual interrelationship of IVPs.

This paper is first to present the panorama of the various value propositions for smart PSS by reviewing the related past literatures. Based on the value scope, the IVPs are categorized into five types: PUO-IVPs, PSO-IVPs, UAO-IVPs, PFO-IVPs, and IEO-IVPs. The corresponding value scope of each type of IVPs are respectively product

Conclusions

This paper explores the IVPs in smart PSS based on literature review method and develops a novel graphics-based rough-fuzzy DEMATEL method to evaluate the IVPs. In the exploration of IVPs for smart PSS, a framework for categorizing IVPs based on the value scope is proposed and applied to identify the IVPs in the product use lifecycle, product idle lifecycle, user activity lifecycle, product generating lifecycle, and industry ecosystem. The review work presents a global panorama for describing

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank SJTU Innovation Center of Producer Service Development, Shanghai Research Center for industrial Informatics, Shanghai Key Lab of Advanced Manufacturing Environment, National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71632008) and Major Project for Aero engines and Gas turbines (Grant No. 2017-I-0007-0008, Grant No.2017-I-0011-0012) for the funding support to this research. In addition, the authors also appreciate the editor and anonymous reviewers for their

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