Concepts for modeling hybrid products in the construction industry

Abstract

Methods for modeling products need to be extended or integrated with other methods when moving from products, i.e., tangible goods, to hybrid products. This paper investigates such modeling methods from a method-engineering perspective. In particular, we consider the construction industry which is increasingly subject of hybrid product strategies as a mean of differentiation. The contribution is that we (1) reconstruct core modeling concepts from six modeling methods and (2) integrate those into a meta model. The analysis shows that the so called result dimension is still dominating, thus what hybrid products provide whereas both the process and resource dimension lack attention and dedicated modeling concepts. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.