A graph-based context-aware requirement elicitation approach in smart product-service systems

The paradigm of Smart product-service systems (Smart PSS) has emerged recently owing to the edge-cutting Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The unique features of Smart PSS including smartness and connectedness, value co-creation and data-driven design manner, enable the collection and analysis of large volume and heterogeneous contextual data to extract useful knowledge. Therefore, requirement elicitation, as a critical process for new solution (i.e. product-service) design, can be conducted in a rather context-aware manner, assured by those massive user-generated data and product-sensed data during the usage stage. Nevertheless, despite a few works on semantic modelling, scarcely any reports on such mechanism in today's smart, connected environment. Aiming to fill this gap, for the first time, a graph-based context-aware requirement elicitation approach considering contextual information within the Smart PSS is proposed. It leverages the pre-defined product, service, and condition ontologies together with Deepwalk technique, to formulate those concepts as nodes and their relationships as the edge of the proposed requirement graph. Implicit stakeholder requirements within a specific context can be further derived based on such interrelationships in a data-driven manner. To demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness, an example of smart bike share system is addressed to illustrate the requirement elicitation process. It is hoped that this explorative study can offer valuable insights for the service providers who would like to extract requirements not only from the voice of customers but also from the user-generated data and product-sensed data.

Automated summary

The paradigm of Smart product-service systems (Smart PSS) utilizes cutting-edge ICT and AI techniques to enable smart and data-driven design. A graph-based context-aware requirement elicitation approach is proposed, leveraging ontologies and Deepwalk technique. An example of smart bike share system is used to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.