Product-Service Integration for Sustainable Solutions : Proceedings of the 5th CIRP International Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems, Bochum, Germany, March 14th - 15th, 2013

"An Industrial Product-Service System is characterized by the integrated and mutually determined planning, development, provision and use of product and service shares including its immanent software components in Business-to-Business applications and represents a knowledge-intensive socio-technical system." - Meier, Roy, Seliger (2010) Since the first conference in 2009, the CIRP International Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems has become a well-established international forum for the review and discussion of advances, research results and industrial improvements. Researchers from all over the world have met at previous IPS(2) conferences in Cranfield (2009), Linkoeping (2010), Braunschweig (2011) and Tokyo (2012). In 2013, the 5th CIRP International Conference on Industrial Product-Service Systems is held in Bochum. Important topics of IPS(2) research presented at the conference are: planning and development, sustainability, business models, operation, service engineering, knowledge management, ICT, modeling and simulation, marketing and economic aspects as well as the role of the human in IPS(2).