A rough set approach for evaluating vague customer requirement of industrial product-service system

Abstract

This research mainly focuses on the customer requirements’ evaluation in the early development of industrial product-service system (IPS2). IPS2 can maintain and enhance manufacturer’s competitiveness by integrating tangible product and intangible service. Accurately capturing and understanding customer requirement are critical for successfully developing the right IPS2 for the right customer. However, there are few researches on requirement evaluation in the early planning phase of IPS2 development. And IPS2 requirement evaluation often involves much subjectivity and vagueness. To solve these problems, a systematic evaluation approach for eliciting and assessing IPS2 requirement under vagueness is proposed. The proposed model of industrial customer activity cycle can efficiently support requirement elicitation from the lifecycle perspective. Besides, the integrated rough group analytic hierarchy process method can effectively deal with subjectivity and vagueness in the IPS2 requirement evaluation process. To demonstrate the potential of the approach, an application in an air compressors system is also illustrated.