Sustainability is a key issue for companies offering products and services on the global market. The ever-increasing worldwide demand for raw materials in combination with the rising costs for materials and energy challenges companies to make their products, processes and services more sustainable. More and more customers are demanding sustainable products and services due to their increased awareness about environmental protection. By providing access to data, information and knowledge about products and services the concept of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) can be applied to reverse logistics processes to improve sustainability. The term PLM and therefore the functionality of existing PLM systems must be considered as quite different. The paper introduces the concept of item-level Product Lifecycle Management. It investigates the requirements that item-level PLM systems must fulfill in order to support sustainability in reverse logistics processes in an appropriate manner. Existing item-level PLM solutions are then investigated according their suitability in the field of reverse logistics.

Due to a global competition today's business world changed dramatically whereas the ongoing trend towards global enterprise networks has lead to increasing customer expectations regarding the performance of logistics systems which have to be simultaneously reliable, robust and cost-effective. One the one hand reliability, robustness and cost-efficiency mainly depend on the availability of suitable ICT-solutions as well as their proper integration into the business processes. As a consequence various systems were developed in the past and are currently in use. On the other hand the seamless access to the data kept by all these different systems is a key issue in order to meet the requirements of logistics systems of today and tomorrow. In this context data integration represents a major challenge which is still unsolved. This paper describes a proposal for a service-oriented approach towards the seamless integration of logistics data which aims at combining existing systems and standards and thus overcoming today's data and information barriers. By accepting existing standards and interfaces this requires innovative approaches addressing the semantic description of data, their transparent transformation between different representations as well as a common interface which can be provided to the various systems which are currently applied in the field of logistics.

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Abstract. Autonomous control in logistic systems is characterized by the ability of logistic objects to process information, to render and to execute decisions on their own. This paper investigates whether the concept of the semantic mediator is applicable to the data integration problems arising from an application scenario of autonomous control in the transport logistics sector. Initially, characteristics of autonomous logistics processes are presented, highlighting the need for decentral data storage in such a paradigma. Subsequently, approaches towards data integration are examined. An application scenario exemplifying autonomous control in the field of transport logistics is presented and analysed, on the basis of which a concept, technical architecture and prototypical implementation of a semantic mediator is developed and described. A critical appraisal of the semantic mediator in the context of autonomous logistics processes concludes the paper, along with an outlook towards ongoing and future work.

Abstract:To remain competitive in the current market, an enterprise must differentiate itself based on higher value propositions. For this purpose, since improving the product or service performance can reach some limits, one potential solution is to move towards new combinations of products and services. This evolution, called servitization, leads to the generation of Product Service Systems (PSS). Servitization requires not only a clear understanding of enterprise core business, but also a clear vision of the prevailing trends and challenges of PSS development from both the business and technological points of view. In addition, the evolution path should be aligned with the enterprise strategy. This paper first highlights the notion of symbiotic PSS where product systems and service systems, and their stakeholders, interoperate seamlessly based on a win-win approach. Then, it proposes a PSS Conceptual Framework (PSS-CF), which can be applied in the early stages of servitization to increase the understating of PSS dimensions and to facilitate the prioritization of the servitization investments. The framework dimensions were discussed in several iterations, from both the academic and industrial points of view, in the frame of a European research project. Moreover, the applicability of the framework was studied in four different industrial use-cases.