Being confronted with decreasing margins and a rising customer demand for integrated solutions, manufacturing companies integrate complementary services into their portfolio. Offering product-service packages (consisting of products and services) demands for setting up integrated product-service systems, which incorporate the coordinated design and provision of products and services. Conceptual Modeling is an established approach to support such efforts. This paper evaluates the current support of reference models and modeling languages for setting up conceptual models in the area of product-service systems.

The authors demonstrate that the creation and provision of product-service packages is a crucial issue in today’s economy. Even so, engineering product-service systems with conceptual models is lacking sound methodological support. They provided an overview of the status quo and presented perspectives for research in two dimensions:

• Cooperation of manufacturers and service providers can be conceptualized by reference models. Facing a lack of reference models suitable for both the areas we propose joining suitable reference models found in the manufacturing and the service sector. This integration is accomplished by identifying interfaces and information flows among manufacturing and service business units.

• Current modeling techniques cannot display processes used in product-service systems in sufficient detail, because they lack an integration of the manufacturing and the service perspective. Therefore, they briefly introduced some characteristics for a suitable domain specific modeling language, which can be constructed by integrating meta-models of modeling languages. The concepts presented in this paper act as a starting point to develop a tighter methodological support for conceptual models, that will be evaluated more thoroughly in a variety of real-life product-service systems.