An approach to enhance product lifecycle management with intelligent sensors

In traditional Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems product information is acquired during manufacturing, transport and storage by sensory deployed throughout the production facilities. This information provides a valuable basis for process optimization or even to early recognize design flaws. As the next step, monitoring of products during their complete lifetime is an upcoming concept. Exploiting real-life usage information opens the door for new strategies like preventive maintenance, adaptive production management or Design for X which will finally create benefit for producers as well as for consumers. The resulting requirements for products and PLM systems differ significantly from traditional approaches. First, the responsibility to acquire and store information now lies with the product and its integrated sensory itself This calls for development of intelligent products. Second, diverse sensor types will be needed in order to provide satisfactory usage information. This leads to a highly heterogeneous hardware landscape. Third, product information is available only irregularly e.g. when a product is in a service garage and in changing location. As a result, a much more dynamic PLM system is needed. In this paper we propose a service oriented approach to meet the requirements of this emerging PLM concept. Key idea is to represent product related information and the sensors they originate from using the notion of services. We will propose mechanisms for interaction between PLM system and hardware and analyze the effects on the respective parts.