Recent development and implementation of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) (e.g. Internet-of-Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical System (CPS)) has triggered a promising market of ...smart, connected product (SCP), and hence, enabled the prevailing tendency of manufacturing value proposition towards a service-oriented manner, viz. Smart product-service systems (PSS). Smart PSS, as a unique type of PSS, aims to achieve individual customer satisfaction with less environment impact by utilizing SCP as the media and tool, to generate various e-services as a bundle. Its service innovation is enabled by a platform-based approach and generated in a data-driven manner. Moreover, the digitalization of users, things, manufacturers and service providers in the cloud-based environment also provides potential service innovation opportunities. Nevertheless, only few existing works discuss about the Smart PSS, let alone an effective manner with valid cases to support its service innovation. Aiming to fill this gap, this research provides a novel definition of Smart PSS, and proposes a systematic design framework for its service innovation with an elaborated case study of a personalized smart wearable. Meanwhile, other potential industrial applications are discussed as well to offer valuable insights to manufacturers in their servitization for value creation.
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•Two criteria-based evaluation for product-service systems classification.•Extended scope of digital twin implementation scenarios.•Platform-based, data-driven and digital twin enabled service innovation.•Four-stage based design approach for service innovation of smart product-service systems.•Smart wearable service innovation and other industrial potentials.
With the rapid advancement of cyber-physical systems, Digital Twin (DT) is gaining ever-increasing attention owing to its great capabilities to realize Industry 4.0. Enterprises from different fields ...are taking advantage of its ability to simulate real-time working conditions and perform intelligent decision-making, where a cost-effective solution can be readily delivered to meet individual stakeholder demands. As a hot topic, many approaches have been designed and implemented to date. However, most approaches today lack a comprehensive review to examine DT benefits by considering both engineering product lifecycle management and business innovation as a whole. To fill this gap, this work conducts a state-of-the art survey of DT by selecting 123 representative items together with 22 supplementary works to address those two perspectives, while considering technical aspects as a fundamental. The systematic review further identifies eight future perspectives for DT, including modular DT, modeling consistency and accuracy, incorporation of Big Data analytics in DT models, DT simulation improvements, VR integration into DT, expansion of DT domains, efficient mapping of cyber-physical data and cloud/edge computing integration. This work sets out to be a guide to the status of DT development and application in today’s academic and industrial environment.
Higher sustainability with extended product lifecycle is a tireless pursuit in companies’ product design/development endeavours. In this regard, two prevailing concepts, namely the smart circular ...system and smart product-service system (Smart PSS), have been introduced, respectively. However, most existing studies only focus on the sustainability of physical materials and components, without considering the cyber-physical resources as a whole, let alone an integrated strategy towards the so-called Sustainable Smart PSS. To fill the gap, this paper discusses the key features in Sustainable Smart PSS development from a broadened scope of cyber-physical resources management. A data-driven reversible framework is hereby proposed to sustainably exploit high-value and context-dependent information/knowledge in the development of Sustainable Smart PSS. A four-step context-aware process in the framework, including requirement elicitation, solution recommendation, solution evaluation, and knowledge evolvement, is further introduced to support the decision-making and optimization along the extended or circular lifecycle. An illustrative example is depicted in the sustainable development of a smart 3D printer, which validates the feasibility and advantages of the proposed framework. As an explorative study, it is hoped that this work provides useful insights for Smart PSS development with sustainability concerns in a cyber-physical environment.
The rapid development and implementation of smart, connected products (SCPs) in the engineering field has triggered a promising manufacturing paradigm of servitization, i.e. smart product-service ...systems (Smart PSS). As a complex solution bundle in both system and product level, its engineering change management differs from the existing ones mainly in two aspects. Firstly, massive in-context stakeholder-generated/product-sensed data during usage stage can be leveraged to enable its success in a data-driven manner. Secondly, the digitalized services, consisting of both hardware and software solutions, can also be changed in a more flexible way other than the physical components alone. Nevertheless, scarcely any work reports on how to conduct engineering change in such context, let alone a systematic approach to support the automatic generation of its change prediction or recommendation. Aiming to fill these gaps, this work proposes an occurrence-based design structure matrix (DSM) approach together with a three-way based cost-sensitive learning approach for automatic engineering change management in the Smart PSS environment. This informatics-based research, as an explorative study, overcomes the subjectivity and tedious assessment of the experts in the conventional approaches, and can offer useful guidelines to the manufacturing companies for managing their engineering changes for product-service innovation process.
The rapid development of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) enlightened more tools and techniques to optimize the smart manufacturing service (SMS) paradigm, emphasizing the services based on ...pervasive IIoT products. However, the serviceability in the smart manufacturing environment is still limited since most of the conventional services are conducted in a passively reactive mode. The knowledge as a service (KaaS) model is hence to be introduced to emphasize the cognitive capability by actively utilizing massive knowledge, where industrial knowledge graph (IKG) plays as the core to generate context-awareness and proactive services for the optimization of serviceability and productivity. Meanwhile, as building IKGs for specific industrial cases is still plagued by the small scale and the lack of continuous enrichment, ensuring the quality and availability of the IKG are still challenging. Aiming to fill this gap with a practical and systematic approach, this paper proposes a generic crowdsourcing approach for continuously evolving the IKG. Through the IKG continuous enrichment approach, IKG-enabled systems indicate the higher value creation ability to utilize knowledge as a kind of service, rather than just a kind of resource. To further illustrate the proposed approach, a case study of a printed circuit board (PCB) processing machine is given with discussions. As an explorative study, future perspectives are also discussed to attract more open and in-depth studies for more robust applications of KaaS and IKG in the IIoT-driven smart manufacturing environment.
The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICT) has enabled the prevailing digital transformation (i.e. digitalization), where physical products can be readily digitized in ...the virtual space and seamlessly interconnected. Meanwhile, industries are ever increasingly adopting service business models (i.e. servitization), so as to offer not only physical products but also services as a solution bundle to meet individual customer needs. Such convergence of both digitalization and servitization (i.e. digital servitization) has triggered an emerging IT-driven business paradigm, smart product-service systems (Smart PSS). As a novel paradigm coined in 2014, to the authors’ knowledge, only 2 conference papers have provided some literature review to date, and many issues remain uncovered or not comprehensively investigated. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper has conducted a systematic review of Smart PSS or related papers published ever since its first brought up to date (30/06/2019), and selected 97 representative items together with other 37 supplementary works to summarize the tendency towards Smart PSS, its business and technical aspects, current challenges, and future perspectives. From the survey, it is found that several hybrid concerns are the key challenges faced, and self-adaptiveness with sustainability, advanced IT infrastructure, human-centric perspectives, and circular lifecycle management are the core future perspectives to explore. It is hoped that this work can attract more open discussions and provide useful insights to both academics and industries in their exploration and implementation of Smart PSS.
Nowadays, the emphasis on manufacturing has shifted from a manufacturer-dominating to a customer-centric manner by actively involving users into the co-creation process to realise individual ...satisfaction. In such era, the rapid development of information and communication technology (e.g. wireless sensor network, and cyber-physical systems) enables a promising market of IT-driven product, i.e. smart, connected product, and also changes the way of user-manufacturer interaction in the product development process. However, to the best of authors' knowledge, co-creation manner in such context is scarcely reported. Meanwhile, there is a lack of any paradigms given to enable such product open innovation along the lifecycle for personalisation concerns. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper, as an explorative research, proposes a new product development paradigm, i.e. smart, connected open architecture product (SCOAP). It follows the adaptable design principles for product extendibility and lifecycle consideration. Moreover, it enlarges the scope of existing open architecture product by involving IT-driven innovation consideration as well. Hence, the definitions, characteristics, evaluation criteria, development method, and lifecycle co-creation context of SCOAP are presented in details. To make it more concrete, a demo project of a smart, connected open architecture bicycle is given at last.
•Provided a literature selection of 119 papers on Knowledge Graph (KG) exploitations in industrial products & services.•Recapped the customization and enhancement on KG to fit in industrial products ...& services.•Summarized the KG-mitigated industry pain points in industrial product development and service innovation.•Depicted the current challenges of KG and KG-enabled information systems to be applied to industrial products & services.•Proposed the future perspectives of promoting KG’s availability and productivity for industrial products & services.
The rapid development of information and communication technologies has enabled a value co-creation paradigm for developing industrial products and services, where massive heterogeneous data and multidisciplinary knowledge are generated and leveraged. In this context, Knowledge Graph (KG) emerges as a promising tool to elicit, fuse, process, and utilize numerous entities and relationships embedded in products and services, as well as their stakeholders. Nevertheless, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is scarcely any comprehensive and thorough discussion about making full use of KG’s potentials to solve pain points of product development and service innovation in the industry. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper conducted a systematic survey of KG exploitations in industrial products and services and the customizations towards higher adaptability to practices. The authors selected 119 representative papers (up to 10/03/2021) together with other 29 supplementary works to summarize the technical and practical efforts and discuss the current challenges of exploiting KG in industrial products and services. Meantime, this work also highlights enhancing KG’s availability and boosting its productivity in industrial products and services development as the core future perspectives to explore. It is hoped that this work can provide a basis for the explorations and implementations of KG-supported industrial product and services development, and attract more open discussions to the exploitation of KG-enabled industrial information systems.
Prefabricated construction has become increasingly popular over the recent years, given its benefits including higher construction speed, lower cost, and improved quality. To facilitate the ...operations of prefabricated construction, various technologies have in parallel been introduced. However, due to its project-based feature and the involvement of numerous Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), the adoption of information technologies is insufficient and varies between SMEs, thereby hindering the improvement of the efficiency of prefabricated construction. Considering these issues and aiming at realizing lean prefabricated construction, this paper proposes an integrated cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) platform through exploiting the concept of cloud asset. Its operation model has also been worked out to enable SMEs to adopt IoT technologies economically and flexibly. Besides, to make the platform compatible and scalable on managing diverse physical assets in different companies and scenarios, a unified cloud asset data model is proposed. Furthermore, an IoT service-sharing module is developed to support different levels of service-sharing on the platform. Finally, a real-life prefabricated construction project in Hong Kong and several lab-based LEGO construction models are adopted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed platform.
•The operation model for SMEs to economically and flexibly use IoT technologies is proposed.•A cloud-based IoT platform is established that could fulfill the diverse requirements among different prefabricated construction projects.•The compatible and scalable cloud asset data model is proposed to represent diverse physical assets.•The IoT service sharing module is developed to share diverse services among users flexibly.•A real-life case study is conducted, which shows the platform is effective on improving the leanness of prefabricated construction.