Product-service system engineering characteristics design for life cycle cost based on constraint satisfaction problem and Bayesian network

A product-service system (PSS) has many engineering characteristics (ECs), their design is a critical work in PSS planning, which has an important influence on the cost and quality of PSS. How to design a reasonable PSS-ECs scheme, and evaluate its life cycle cost (LCC) is a challenging task. Aiming at the PSS-ECs design for LCC, this paper proposes a new PSS design method, it first treats and models the design of PSS-ECs as a customer requirements-based constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) for finding an initial set of satisfied PSS-ECs schemes, and then it evaluates these schemes based on Bayesian network (BN)-based LCC estimation model for finding an optimal scheme as a solution. Constructing a BN describing the uncertain relationships between PSS-ECs and LCC is the core of this research. By combining existing R&D data and expert experience, Bayesian estimation and arithmetic averaging are used to estimate the conditional probability in BN. Take a subway bogie and its maintenance service in a Chinese company as an example to verify the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can effectively solve the problem of PSS-ECs design for LCC, it also shows that this method has positive significance in realizing engineering knowledge consolidation, assisting designers in exploring design space, and improving the rationality of design decisions.