Comparative analysis of methods and tools applicability for product and IPSS development based on text mining techniques

Abstract

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IP'S POT. 2') is an innovative way of doing business potentially capable of answering sustainability challenges. The interest in IP'S POT. 2' has opened several research branches as one concerned on how to properly develop it. Well-known methods and tools have been adapted for IP'S POT. 2' development or new ones created by researches. This knowledge is spread out in publications and in the web and can only be processed by the use of Text Mining (TM) techniques. This paper presents an exploratory research that performs some steps of the TM process with the purpose of identifying and assessing which methods and tools are already applied at practical real cases. With this information, an user can select the most appropriated method or tool for her/his organization. The process assessed the 2009-2014 CIRP IPSS Proceedings and it was possible to start an applicability study of both traditional methods and tools, and those specific for IP'S POT. 2' development. This application provided promising results and insights for future work on this research, e. g.: to perform the next TM process steps; to explore other TM techniques; to create an applicability metric; and to incorporate other sources of documents.