A rough DEMATEL-based approach for evaluating interaction between requirements of product-service system

- Interaction between requirements of product-service system (PSS) is evaluated.
- The method integrates rough set theory and group DEMATEL together.
- It can identify the essential requirements for the PSS development project.
- It can flexibly manipulate vague judgments without much prior information.
- The method can obtain the causal and effect relationships among requirements.

Requirements analysis and understanding play a key role in the successful development of Product-Service System (PSS). Some PSS requirements may interact with others and even with the environment due to different stakeholder's preference and PSS heterogeneity. Thus, it is necessary to understand the dependencies and correlations between the underlying PSS requirements. However, there are few researches on requirement interaction evaluation and analysis in the early planning phase of PSS development. Besides, PSS requirement interaction evaluation often involves much vagueness due to the subjective judgments. To solve these problems, a systematic method for assessing and analyzing PSS requirement dependencies under vagueness is proposed. The proposed method integrates strength of group DEMATEL (Decision-Making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory) in assessing interaction relationship and merit of rough set theory in manipulating subjective judgments. To demonstrate the potential of the approach, an application in an air compressors system is also illustrated.