Product lifecycle management solution for collaborative development of Wearable Meta-Products using set-based concurrent engineering

Abstract

The trend of smart products is now changing the world and transforming the life of customers. People tend to be more tied to smart, connected products seeking to ease and improve quality of life and find new ways to make things such as daily tasks differently. In this context, the world of clothing has noticed a big advance targeting various applications: sport, gaming, and health monitoring and rehabilitation. Wearable smart products are intelligent hybrid products made of garments, sensor networks, and applications, interacting with users and the environment capable of real-time data processing and storage, with capabilities to extend functionalities by communicating with other things. The multi-functionality property of smart products needs the integration of various electronic parts. High variety of parts with different interfaces makes the development of smart products complex than generic products and requires the involvement and close collaboration of multidisciplinary team (garment designers, sensor networks designers, and application developers). A high number of alternative designs can be considered at the beginning of the design process due to this variety and high availability of parts. The smart product development team needs then to explore multiple candidate solutions before finding the best smart product design that complies with the requirements. This work proposes the set-based concurrent engineering to deal efficiently with the alternatives. Therefore, this article provides a novel approach to shift from set-based concurrent engineering theoretical principles toward a pragmatic (practical) application to wearable smart products taking advantage of product lifecycle management system capabilities for the implementation. The use of product lifecycle management system to support the set-based concurrent engineering process will contribute for a better understanding of the approach avoiding confusions, simplify the architecture of the solution in view of integration with other systems, and enable the stakeholders to focus on the level of innovation of the smart product.