The essential value of a product-service system (PSS) is the value-in-context that is co-created through interaction within the context of each stakeholder. To enhance this value, designers are required to continuously meet the requirements of each stakeholder by effectively grasping their unique contexts. On the other hand, the causal relationships among the elements constituting the contexts of multiple stakeholders are complex and multi-layered, and it is not easy to grasp the influence of changes in these elements over time on each context. In this paper, we propose a PSS design support method that enables an integrated grasp of the causal structure of contextual elements across multiple time axes, based on the perspectives of each stakeholder. Specifically, by utilizing system dynamics, the causal relationships among elements such as functions and attributes of a PSS are quantitatively modeled, and simulations are conducted. In this process, the introduction of surrogate modeling methods supports the simplified grasp of the behavior of systems involving multi-layered time axes. Furthermore, we apply the proposed method to a PSS case study and discuss the results obtained from its validation.
ASHIKARI et al. (Wed,) studied this question.