Facilitating consistency of business model and technical models in product-service-systems development: An ontology approach

Due to the fast growing and ever changing innovation cycles, industries are changing their strategies from a product-centric to service-centric approach, leading to the emergence of product-service systems (PSS) which integrate services into physical technical systems. In the model-based development of PSS, various models are employed by different stakeholders to represent their views on the system. However, there is a high diversity of these models in both forms and contents. Among others, business models and technical models come in different levels of abstraction, and thus, are hard to align with each other. In this study, we propose an approach to support PSS development by relating business models to technical models using ontology. Web ontology language (OWL) is employed to describe PSS knowledge, the Query Language SPARQL and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) are used for consistency checking and reasoning potential inconsistencies.