Obsolescence Challenges for Product-Service Systems in Aerospace and Defence Industry

The aerospace and defence industries are moving towards new types of agreement such as availabilitycontracts based on Product-Service System (PSS) business models. Obsolescence has become one of themain problems that will impact on many areas of the system during its life cycle. This paper presents themajor challenges to managing obsolescence for availability contracts, identified by means of acomprehensive literature review and several interviews and forums with experts in obsolescencemanagement. It is observed that there is a lack of understanding of the impact of obsolescence on whole lifecost. Experts agree that the development of a framework to support estimation, management, and mitigationof these costs is desirable, but the difficulty in forecasting future obsolescence issues constrains industry toa reactive approach rather than proactive.