The aerospace and defence industries are moving towards new types of agreement such as availabilitycontracts based on Product-Service System (PSS) business models. Obsolescence has become one of themain problems that will impact on many areas of the system during its life cycle. This paper...

The main aim of the research work presented in this thesis, is the development of anovel framework with the capability of assessing the impact of implementing leanmanufacturing within small-to-medium sized manufacturing firms (SMEs). By assessingthe impact of lean implementation, SMEs can make...

Most of the current attempts for business process optimisation are manual without involving any formal automated methodology. This paper proposes a framework for multi-objective optimisation of business process designs. The framework uses a generic business process model that is formally defined...

Currently, manufacturing organisations worldwide are shifting their businessmodels towards Product-Service Systems (PSS), which implies thedevelopment of new support agreements such as availability-based contracts.This transition is shifting the responsibilities for managing and...

In today’s networked economy, strategic business partnerships and outsourcing has become the dominantparadigm where companies focus on core competencies and skills, as creative design, manufacturing, orselling. However, achieving seamless interoperability is an ongoing challenge these networks...

This paper presents a generic conceptual model of risk evaluation in order to manage the risk throughrelated constraints and variables under a multi-agent collaborative design environment. Initially, a hierarchyconstraint network is developed to mapping constraints and variables. Then, an...

Today’s corporate environments are characterized by growing dynamics and uncertainties. Here, flexibilitygains importance as a critical success factor. This is especially true for long-term customer-supplierrelationships. As a solution to the mentioned uncertainties connected with such a...

Two defence contracts for availability are studied in the attempt to better understanding the provision ofservice in a maintenance, repair and overhaul environment that is contracted on the performance of theequipment, rather than merely providing equipment. The nature of the contract changes...

Companies from industrialised nations are faced with the threat of competition from low-cost countries. Wesuggest Industrial Product Service Systems (IPS²) as a possible answer. But as the development andproduction can be quite expensive for the supplier, the question arises how the net...