An architecture for ubiquitous product life cycle support system and its extension to machine tools with product data model

Product life cycle information is utmost important for the stakeholders involved from product design, manufacturing, through product retirement. However, information on products after they become available to the customer becomes vague or unrecognized. Furthermore, various real-time data from the shop floor or usage data from customers are not gathered in real time. To overcome this problem, we present an ubiquitous product life cycle support (UPLS) system based on the UbiDM: a new paradigm for design and manufacturing via ubiquitous technology proposed by our research center. Specifically, in this paper, we derive a generic architecture for the UPLS system based on the UbiDM and requirement analysis from the various functional- and data-level perspectives. As an extension, we apply the generic architecture for the machine tools by developing a life cycle data model to be used for the UPLS system for machine tools. The machine tools were taken as an example among the products considering the importance of every life cycle of the product (i.e., Begin-of-Life, Middle-of-Life, and End-of-Life) and the necessity of international standards under establishment by the ISO TC184/SC1 and SC4. The impact and validity of the developed architecture and data model were made by some realistic usage scenarios with the UPLS system incorporating the architecture and data model developed in this paper.