Context-sensitive decision support for improved sustainability of product lifecycle

The paper presents a new approach to applying context awareness in order to create context-sensitive decision support services in an eco-process engineering systems setting. Optimizing the life-cycle of industrial products is subject to the options of continuously updating them by incorporating cutting edge technologies, replacing worn out pieces by new improved ones, and conceptually changing components of the product itself. While new products benefit from cutting edge technologies, the highest impact is achieved by upgrading existing products in operation, leading to the "long life eco-products" concept. The proposed approach uses context awareness to enable evaluating the performance of engineered products based on the whole life-cycle, so that product engineering teams can exploit this information to adapt the design, operation, and disposal strategies of products. One of the key assumptions of this approach is that the results of analysing contextual information and previously taken decisions can be used to reconfigure application-specific services positioned anywhere along the life-cycle of a product; by monitoring the development life-cycle and the product enriched with context from ambient intelligence, the services supporting the life-cycle can be configured in order to have faster update iterations. The presented approach will be validated against three different business cases.