Many manufacturers today are striving to provide high value-addedproduct-service offerings (PSO) to their customers. PSO has heterogonous structureand various requirements, which may lead to technical attributes' conflicts during thedesign process. The conflicts will lead to the difficulty of concept generation, increaseof service delivery failure, and eventually the decrease of customer satisfaction.However, the conflicts in PSO design areas are more intangible and harder toformulate. Moreover, those conflicts are often resolved with trial and error methods inad hoc processes, which largely depend on the designer’s intuition. Thus, in this paper,the authors propose a systematic method to identify PSO design conflicts and resolvethem. The proposed method is based on the approach of service function andattributes analysis, group decision making with unbalanced linguistic label set andTRIZ methodology. In addition, a case study of design conflict identification andresolution for elevator service reveals the feasibility and potentials of the proposedmethod.
Funding agencies: Natural Science Foundation of China [71501006, 71420107025, 71332003]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities; Mistra REES (Resource Efficient and Effective Solutions) program - Mistra in Sweden (The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Envir