The emergence of smart Product-Service Systems (smart PSS) presents numerous challenges for enterprises. The complexity of designing smart PSS adds to the need for consistent support for manufacturers. Both academia and practitioners highlight the importance of methodological support for successful development of smart PSS. This paper therefore investigates the suitability of existing support for smart PSS. Based on a systematic literature review, 17 support methods are identified and their key characteristics are discussed in the context of real PSS use cases.

Though they can be traced back to different roots, both smart design and smart systems have to do with the recent developments of artificial intelligence. There are two major questions related to them: (i) What way are smart design and smart systems enabled by artificial narrow, general, or super intelligence? and (ii) How can smart design be used in the realization of smart systems? and How can smart systems contribute to smart designing? A difficulty is that there are no exact definitions for these novel concepts in the literature. The endeavor to analyze the current situation and to answer the above questions stimulated an exploratory research whose first findings are summarized in this paper. Its first part elaborates on a plausible interpretation of the concept of smartness and provides an overview of the characteristics of smart design as a creative problem solving methodology supported by artificial intelligence. The second part exposes the paradigmatic features and system engineering issues of smart systems, which are equipped with application-specific synthetic system knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. The third part presents and elaborates on a conceptual model of AI-based couplings of smart design and smart systems. The couplings may manifest in various concrete forms in real life that are referred to as “connectors” in this paper. The principal types of connectors are exemplified and discussed. It has been found that smart design tends to manifest as a methodology of blue-printing smart systems and that smart systems will be intellectualized the enablers of implementation of smart design. Understanding the affordances of and creating proper connectors between smart design and smart systems need further explorative research.

Functional design is regarded as a design activity primarily aimed at clarifying customer needs, and developing the functional architecture and solution concepts for a system under development. Existing functional design approaches are mainly focused on how to assist designers in searching for solution principles for desired products, which, however, do not adequately take into account the interactions between a smart system under development and its environment, and cannot explicitly represent the complex functional logic of the system, resulting in that they cannot effectively assist designers in the functional design of smart systems. Therefore, this paper proposes a scenario-integrated approach for functional design of smart systems to address the above issues. Based on the concept of scenario in software engineering, the proposed approach explicitly elaborates how to employ scenarios to express subjective customer needs and how to generate the functional architectures and the corresponding solution concepts through a structured process. The functional design of the automated doors-unlocking system of a smart vehicle is employed to illustrate the proposed approach, which also demonstrates that the proposed approach is suitable for functional design of smart systems.