From Stakeholder Feedback to Product–Service System Design: A Sentiment-Based Decision-Support Framework Validated in Industrial Cases

Product–Service Systems (PSS) require feedback loops that connect stakeholder experience with design decisions, but distributed feedback is often difficult to transform into actionable design knowledge. This paper synthesises previously distributed results from the DIVERSITY project into an integrated decision-support framework for feedback-driven PSS design. The framework combines social-sentiment representation, reach/influence weighting, opinion modelling, monitoring, extraction and prediction modules, and a hierarchical similarity mechanism for exploring likely sentiment toward new PSS configurations. It was implemented in the DIVERSITY engineering environment and assessed through a preliminary polarity plausibility check, controlled testing with synthetic data generated by OpinionSim, and three industrial business cases. The results indicate that the framework can support segmentation-aware interpretation of stakeholder feedback, shorten the path from market signals to design action, and provide exploratory evidence for early PSS concept generation and redesign. The predictive component is presented as an exploratory design-support mechanism, with forecasting accuracy remaining a topic for future empirical validation. The paper contributes an integrated feedback-to-design framework for PSS and clarifies the conditions under which sentiment-based indicators are most useful in B2C and B2B settings.