Value – Function – Structure Modeling in an Ontological Representation of Product-Service Systems
Yong Se Kim, Eric Zengxiang Wang, Myon-Woong Park · 2009
An ontological representation of product-service systems (PSS) is presented, which could support the development of new computer-aided tools and frameworks for PSS design. In this ontology, a PSS consists of values, product and service elements, and their relations. PSS and its product and service elements are further specified by attributes of function, behavior, structure, context, and environment. This paper further describes an ontological representation of the mappings between values, functions, and structures. This is developed as an ontology of generic decomposition knowledge, which can express an abstraction/realization hierarchy across multiple levels of abstraction, in which an element at a higher level (more abstract) is mapped to one or more sets of elements at a lower level (more detailed). The same ontology is also applied to represent multiple levels of abstraction in a function decomposition of products within a PSS.