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At a time when modes of consumption are rapidly evolving, consumer attitudes and expectations are changing. Today, customers want more and more products and services that can be customised to their needs. Furthermore, they are more willing to pay for usage of a product rather than ownership. On the other hand, companies are adding more and more services to the products they are bringing to market in order to create added value and differentiate themselves from their competitors. To adapt to these new market trends, companies now have to offer their customers a more sophisticated catalog of solutions, in both product and services, including all conceivable combinations of the two. The aim of this article is to propose a generic knowledge-based model, dedicated to commercial offer configuration which is able to cope with the whole variety of solutions a company can deliver. To our knowledge, although some works on product configuration, service and product-service system configuration exist, none of them is generic enough to support product, service and product-service configuration at the same time when defining commercial offers. In this article, after giving a state-of-the-art assessment of product and service configurations, the need for a generic model able to cover the whole range and diversity of commercial offers is established, a knowledge-based model is defined and its relevance is demonstrated on seven use-cases coming from secondary and tertiary sector companies.

During the last decade, the smart grid (SG) concept has started to become a reality, mainly thanks to the technical progress achieved in telecommunications, informatics and power electronics, among other domains, leading to an evolution of the traditional electrical grid into an intelligent one. Nowadays, the SG can be seen as a system of smart systems that include cyber and physical parts from different technologies that interact with each other. In this context, intelligent buildings (IBs) constitute a paradigm in which such smart systems are able to guarantee the comfort of residents while ensuring an appropriate tradeoff of energy production and consumption by means of an energy management system (EMS). These interconnected EMSs remain the objective of potential cyber-attacks, which is a major concern. Therefore, this paper conducts a survey, from a multidisciplinary point of view, of some of the main security and privacy issues related to IBs as part of the SG, including an overview of EMS, smart meters, and the main communication networks employed to connect IBs to the overall SG. Future research directions towards a security enhancement from both technical and human perspectives are also provided.