International audienceWhat “open source” means once applied to tangible products has been so far mostly addressed through the light of licensing. While this approach is suitable for software, it appears to be over-simplistic for complex hardware products. Whether such a product can be labelled as open source is not only a question of licence but a question of documentation, i.e. what is the information that sufficiently describes it? Or in other words, what is the “source” of open source hardware? To date there is no simple answer to this question, leaving large room for interpretation in the usage of the term. Based on analysis of public documentation of 132 products, this paper provides an overview of how practitioners tend to interpret the concept of open source hardware. It specifically focuses on the recent evolution of the open source movement outside the domain of electronics and DIY to that of non-electronic and complex open source hardware products. The empirical results strongly indicate the existence of two main usages of open source principles in the context of tangible products: publication of product-related documentation as a means to support community-based product development and to disseminate privately developed innovations. It also underlines the high variety of interpretations and even misuses of the concept of open source hardware. This reveals in turn that this concept may not even be clear to practitioners and calls for more narrowed down definitions of what has to be shared for a product to be called open source. This article contributes towards this effort through the definition of an open source hardware lifecycle summarizing the observed approaches to open source hardware

Product-service systems (PSS) are often presented as an inherently sustainable business model. The argumentation is often based on theoretical considerations, which cite circular economy (CE) characteristics in PSS business models as an explanation. In this paper we examined to what extent positive and negative sustainability effects of PSS could actually be observed, based on use cases. For this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature review and analyzed the statements on sustainability effects based on the triple bottom line approach. We find that positive sustainability effects, especially on the environmental sustainability of PSS, are described disproportionately often, which may be indicating a possible publication bias. In addition, the methods used to derive statements on sustainability effects are very heterogeneous and often unsystematic, making it difficult to compare the described effects. Furthermore, we were able to identify drivers that are particularly often considered in literature to be responsible for sustainability effects. As a result, we were able to derive direct implications for future research in the field of sustainability assessment of PSS.

In Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) there is yet no converged terminology. The term ‘system model’ is used in different contexts in literature. In this study we elaborated the definitions and usages of the term ‘system model’, to find a common definition. We analyzed 104 publications in depth for their usage and definition as well as their meta-data e.g., the publication year and publication background to find some common patterns. While the term is gaining more interest in recent years, it is used in a broad range of contexts for both analytical and synthetic use cases. Based on this, three categories of system models have been defined and integrated into a more precise definition.

Sensor models provide the required environmental perception information for the development and testing of automated driving systems in virtual vehicle environments. In this article, a configurable sensor model architecture is introduced. Based on methods of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and functional decomposition, this approach supports a flexible and continuous way to use sensor models in automotive development. Modeled sensor effects, representing single-sensor properties, are combined to an overall sensor behavior. This improves reusability and enables adaptation to specific requirements of the development. Finally, a first practical application of the configurable sensor model architecture is demonstrated, using two exemplary sensor effects: the geometric field of view (FoV) and the object-dependent FoV.