Design patterns for managing product life cycle information

Abstract

As the number of companies participating in the manufacturing of products increases, the challenges on managing the product life cycle also increase. A major challenge is how to manage product-related information when it is spread on computer systems of multiple companies. It is possible to perform this task in many ways ranging from centralised "portal" systems to distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures. This paper attempts to point out the advantages and drawbacks of these different approaches for managing of product information through the products' whole lifecycle. Design Patterns from object-oriented programming are presented as a potential model for organizing product information and operations performed on it.

Tracking of Returnable Packaging and Transport Units with active RFID in the grocery supply chain

“…Let us first remark that efficient product traceability depends on the data model used [25,26]. MEGAS-TAND supports the use of an item-centric approach [25], since tracking is done on a package-level basis (the MT) and its current location is just another property of the information associated to a product.…”

Requirements on unique identifiers for managing product lifecycle information: comparison of alternative approaches

“…This approach offers similar extensibility and adaptability as the Internet itself (see e.g. Främling and Holmström, 2006c), where the combination of an object-oriented approach, semantic relations and design patterns are used for managing distributed product information as described in (Främling et al, 2007). '123@abc.com;is-part-of;321@cba.com' or '456@abc.com;contains;654@cba.com' that are stored e.g.…”

Gathering Product Data From Smart Products

“…But when a shipping pallet is filled with these boxes of pills, it does not make sense that every one of them is reported separately, but rather they should appear as sub-objects of the shipping pallet. These product hierarchies can be modeled by applying the Composite design pattern (Främling et al, 2007a). The messaging system to enable IoT must be able to convey product life cycle events, such as the product becoming a sub-product of an other product, or the endof-life of a product, in addition to the gathering of product data such as sensor readings for the needs of product monitoring systems.…”

“…The callback method interface also provides a mechanism for nodes to send events to each other (with or without a prior subscription, subject to the particular node implementation). Indeed, the callback method is an embodiment of the Observer pattern in (Främling et al, 2007a).…”