Ambient intelligence in product life-cycle management

To fulfil the increasing demands today the short innovation time and the high quality of production itself is not enough in production of goods, but all phases of a product (from idea to recycling) should be managed by advanced tools and means. Nowadays the competition among companies, joined to the environmental protection rules, is so compelling that they should not only be on the top of technology in the area, but also run their business according to life-long models. The emphasis on the product post-sale life is common for these models. The most popular model is Product Life-cycle Management, for manufacturing companies, or Service Engineering (SE), for service-oriented companies, and, for both, common paradigms are in maintenance, with conformance-to-use certification. The paper introduces some basic research results achieved in the application of Ambient Intelligence, and suggests considering maintenance as a cross section of the two business paradigms. The importance of SE is specially underlined in this work. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.