Towards a meta-model for the description of the sociotechnical perspective on Product-Service Systems

Due to the increased pressure from today's globalized economy, companies need to develop innovative systems in order to achieve greater market competitiveness. Product-Service Systems (PSS) are one possibility to realize this. In order to successfully realize PSS, their surrounding social subsystems containing vital stakeholders such as suppliers and service providers, legislative bodies and users, need to be designed and developed along with the technical components. In order to achieve this, the modelling of large and complex sociotechnical systems becomes necessary. These sociotechnical systems result from the existence of multiple social and technical subsystems within PSS that are highly interconnected. Various tools for the analysis of complex sociotechnical systems exist, however there are currently no systematic approaches available in PSS research to describe these sociotechnical systems in order to create comparable system models. This paper describes the development of a metamodel for modeling of such sociotechnical systems. The approach applied is a combination of a literature survey into existing approaches of PSS metamodeling and the abstraction of concrete models created based on a case study of a bike sharing system developed by students. In the future, the metamodel will be refined, formalized, and used as a basis to conduct e.g. complexity analyses of sociotechnical systems of PSS. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.