Towards Smart Product Lifecycle Management with an Integrated Reconfiguration Management

Abstract

Recent ICT innovations determine dramatically changes of traditional products towards intelligent, connected Smart Products. These product-related changes also imply the need for a fundamental adaption and enhancement of traditional Product Lifecycle Management approaches. Analyzing the main characteristics of Smart Products reveals that lifecycle management approaches for Smart Products especially have to extend their focus on the product use phase. A core challenge in this context is to provide suitable methods and IT tools for the reconfiguration of Smart Products across different engineering domains. This contribution introduces a conceptual approach for the reconfiguration of Smart Products, which considers the dynamical changes of virtual and physical product instances based on the virtual product twin. This approach was implemented and validated prototypically in a model-environment considering smart vehicles, that where temporarily reconfigured during their use phase.