SL: A Reference Smartness Level Scale for Smart Artifacts

Abstract

During the last two decades, many products, research projects and prototypes were announced with different characteristics and capabilities, all adopting the “smart” qualifier word. If a smartness property could not be defined simply as true or false, defining a suitable range was not an easy task. This issue led to the proposal of some classification models, frameworks and taxonomies for project classifications, but none of them provide a clear and pragmatic smartness scale able to classify smart artifacts and serve as a reference. This paper aims to propose a smartness scale to help research and non-research communities to better quantify and easily understand the features and autonomy of smart artifacts. The proposed smartness scale considers the main function of physical-device components in smart systems. The provided smartness scale is based on a uni-dimensional typology that defines 12 different smartness levels, created based on our definition of “smart artifact” and by following an evolutionary set of capabilities ranging from traceable-only and sensing-capable artifacts to autonomous, adaptable and self-driven artifacts. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed smartness scale, an analytic model was defined and applied to several research- and market-based artifacts tagged as smart in order to extract their smartness levels.