The Augmentation Concept: How to Make a Product "Active" during Its Life Cycle

The recent developments in infotronics and communication allow the development of "intelligent" products. This chapter proposes the concept of "activeness" and a modelling approach to increase a system's informational, communicational and decisional capacities in a distributed architecture. The "activeness" concept is then applied in two case studies. The first concerns the "product-driven" control of a real manufacturing cell. The second is related to the advanced diagnosis of complex systems in a railway application. Our results have allowed the origins of some of the defects to be found more easily and quickly than the traditional approaches.