Hybrid Simulators for Product Service-Systems - innovation potential demonstrated on urban bike mobility

One major goal of the Rethinking Prototyping project is to bring scientists from different domains like engineering and arts to explore collaboratively new approaches of development and testing of Product Service Systems (PSS). PSS combine products, services, and infrastructure to fulfil individual customer needs. Therefore, the development of PSS is an extension of traditional engineering design process, which mainly refers to purely tangible products or intangible services into an integrated development process of products and services. The basis is a new technology called Smart Hybrid Prototyping (SHP), a joint development by Fraunhofer IPK and the TU Berlin. SHP is an innovative technology for a multimodal interdisciplinary evaluation of virtual prototypes in early development stages. It is based upon methods of Mixed Reality extended by modern industrial technologies to allow natural interaction with virtual prototypes of mechanical or mechatronic systems. It serves as a bridge between physical reality and digital virtuality. The use cases in this paper are based on urban bike mobility. Therefore, three concepts have been worked out to specify main requirements for an urban hybrid bike simulator. The first use case is from the perspective of a bicycle rental, where rental services for the users can be developed, validated, and optimized. The second use case provides the integration of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets for the development and validation of mobile services for bicyclists. The third use case is oriented on development and validation of new bicycles and urban mobility concepts like e-bikes, pedelecs, tripelecs and sharing services. Based on these generic use cases the requirements on a hybrid bicycle simulator were derived. Why a bicycle simulator? Well, we are firmly convinced that the future of urban mobility is determined from trends such as ecological rethinking and the desire for sports and healthy life. Furthermore, it is one of the most competitive and agile markets using most innovative materials and manufacturing technologies. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.