Industries such as aerospace and construction are moving from providing products (e.g. engines and high-tech buildings) to providing services (e.g. thrust on aircraft wings and fully-maintained workspaces). This has changed economics of these industries, and places new demands on the design of future products and services. In the case of the aerospace sector, companies are currently transforming their business to include servicing of the engines that they manufacture, so as to maintain their revenues. In other sectors, integrated product and service provision manifests itself in other forms. For example, in the construction sector, integrated product and service provision is sustained by Public Private Partnership (PPP) and Private Funding Initiative (PFI) procurement methods; these approaches support early design initiation, lower costs, increased value for money, shorter construction times and higher quality in the end product. The industries involved need specialised tools to manage these new activities.
There is a need to study how the life-cycle costing of modules, components and parts is carried out by these industries and see what processes are needed to support this activity. This will involve developing appropriate storage and retrieval methods for the information needed to use, upgrade and re-furbish these very complex, long-lived products - leading to lower costs for the service provider.
Integration of the design processes, delivery mechanisms and information management also needs to be studied and analysed, to support and provide efficient mechanisms for the supply of these services.
Completed Research
Integrated Product/Process/Rational Modelling (KIM)
Developing integrated product, process and rationale models that will enable the capture of design information.
Integrated Products and Services
Understanding the processes that take place in service, the demands of service and life cycle approaches and their mutual dependencies.
