Towards Smart Product Lifecycle Management with an Integrated Reconfiguration Management

Abstract

Recent ICT innovations determine dramatically changes of traditional products towards intelligent, connected Smart Products. These productrelated changes also imply the need for a fundamental adaption and enhancement of traditional Product Lifecycle Management approaches. Analyzing the main characteristics of Smart Products reveals that lifecycle management approaches for Smart Products especially have to extend their focus on the product use phase. A core challenge in this context is to provide suitable methods and IT tools for the reconfiguration of Smart Products across different engineering domains. This contribution introduces a conceptual approach for the reconfiguration of Smart Products, which considers the dynamical changes of virtual and physical product instances based on the virtual product twin. This approach was implemented and validated prototypically in a model-environment considering smart vehicles, that where temporarily reconfigured during their use phase

Development capabilities for smart products

“…The major changeover can be morphological and topological changes or replacing units [155]. Reconfiguration, being minor or major ones, takes place at different levels of the system, i.e., structure, behaviour, and function [7,8,31,195,196]. An example of reconfigurability is modular architecture, which is supported by modulewise interoperability and standard interface between modules.…”

“…6 depicts life-time reconfiguration of a smart vehicle that goes through static reconfiguration in the middle of its life and later dynamic real-time reconfiguration. Static reconfiguration means non-personalized reconfiguration for all instances regardless of the environment in which these smart products exist, while dynamic reconfiguration is highly personalized based on the environmental data and thus instance-based [8,196].…”

Creation of a Digital Passport for an Electronic Product and Generation of Design Solutions Based on It

“…The defects identified in this case are obvious and more significant in the vector of development of Industry 4.0 [3][4][5][6][7]. This indicates the need to generalize data about the product and design-production procedures at all stages of the life cycle in the instrumentmaking industry, as well as the implementation of procedures for their analysis for making design decisions by enterprises.…”

Smart design of intelligent companion toys for preschool children

“…Their case study demonstrates that the APP (applications) can help tailor to the personalized needs of users. Abramovici et al (2017) propose an approach for the design and configuration of smart products. Their framework utilizes virtual product twin to consider dynamic changes of product instances.…”