Evaluation of an IPS2 Delivery Planning Approach in Industry – Limitations and Necessary Adaptations

After having been planned, developed and implemented, Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) enter the operation phase of the IPS2 lifecycle. During the operation phase, the IPS2 provider is facing the challenge to effectively and efficiently schedule IPS2 delivery processes and assign available resources from the IPS2 network. IPS2 delivery planning is an optimization problem of great complexity which is subject to various constraints within a large solution space. Computational support is needed to systematically exploit IPS2-specific planning flexibility options and find close-to-optimum planning solutions. For this purpose, an IPS2 planning method has been development and prototypically implemented in an IPS2 Execution System. In this paper, a first evaluation of the implemented planning method in an industrial setting is presented. The results indicate that the planning method for IPS2 delivery planning generally satisfies the requirements of the industrial evaluation partner. Possibilities for further development as well as limitations of the IPS2 delivery planning approach are presented.