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Smart Products: An Introduction
Abstract
Sophisticated commercial products and product assemblies can greatly benefit from novel IT-based approaches to the conditioning
of these products and of ‘product knowledge’, leading to what we call Smart Products. The paper motivates the need for such
novel approaches, introduces important relevant challenges and research domains, and provides an early definition of Smart
Products.
... In terms of "performative" characteristics, smart artifacts consist of personalization, connectivity, improved functionality, improved interaction, and collecting, processing, and providing data capabilities. They offer personalization based on consumer needs, wants, and effects that allow the users to choose and combine modalities [17][18][19][20][21]. They have network capability via Wi-Fi connection to at least one network to other agents on the internet that provides "connectivity in multiple forms: one-to-one connection, one-to-many, many-to-many" and P2P connection to "efficiently communicate with other products, services, and users [17,19,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. ...
... They offer personalization based on consumer needs, wants, and effects that allow the users to choose and combine modalities [17][18][19][20][21]. They have network capability via Wi-Fi connection to at least one network to other agents on the internet that provides "connectivity in multiple forms: one-to-one connection, one-to-many, many-to-many" and P2P connection to "efficiently communicate with other products, services, and users [17,19,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. By being "directly or indirectly digitally augmented and connected" to the processing environment and to the events of the real world through real-time mapping systems, they have access rights to objects, ambient resources, and devices to act jointly and exchange personal information [17,18,27,[30][31][32]. ...
... They have network capability via Wi-Fi connection to at least one network to other agents on the internet that provides "connectivity in multiple forms: one-to-one connection, one-to-many, many-to-many" and P2P connection to "efficiently communicate with other products, services, and users [17,19,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. By being "directly or indirectly digitally augmented and connected" to the processing environment and to the events of the real world through real-time mapping systems, they have access rights to objects, ambient resources, and devices to act jointly and exchange personal information [17,18,27,[30][31][32]. Their improved capabilities expose multiple, new, and complex functions, whether provided by the physical embodiment of communication functionality or by manufacturers of third-party providers, that provide use-value, perceptual qualities, better functionality, or services that produce useful results through activities that make them hyperfunctional or multifunctional [18,30,31,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. ...
The domestication of smart artifacts has transformed our homes into hybrid environments of physical and digital worlds. It also has been changing our mindsets, behaviors, meaning attributions to, expectations from, frustrations about, and interactions with smart artifacts. By extension, the smartness definition is reconstructed by users who are the subject of smart artifact experiences. The current study is aimed at uncovering the user experience of smart artifacts with a focus on cognitive and emotional aspects to better understand what users expect when an artifact is identified as “smart.” Therefore, an online research study is conducted to gain insight into the user experience of smart artifacts from content-rich reviews on e-commerce websites. Robot vacuum cleaners, smartwatches, and smart speakers were chosen as exemplary smart artifacts of the study. Because they offer different types of interaction with distinct aspects, our findings indicate that smartness is associated with trust in expertise, emotional engagement, exaggerated evaluation, and intriguing existence concepts about Emotional UX. In Cognitive UX, smartness relates to reducing mental workload, gratifying experience, perceived phenotype, reciprocal acquaintance, trust-building experience, tailored situatedness, shaping sociality, physical competency, and dual enhancement concepts. These findings demonstrate the potential of conceptualization in the early stages of smart artifact design processes.
... al. (2013) shows that there are several different but complementary definitions for the concept of a smart product [4]. According to different definitions, a smart product is an autonomous object (and also a software, or service [5] which is designed for self-organized embedding into different environments in the course of its life-cycle (product innovation, applications and services) and which allows for a natural product-to-human, (environment, other products and systems [6]) interaction. Within this scope, smart product design is defined as Gutiérrez and et. ...
... To overcome the complexity and to achieve simplicity is, paradoxically, a result of massively complex ideation. As it is difficult to do simple, as Mühlhäuser (2007) states "mastering the simplicity paradox will be deterministic for product success" (p.158) and IT "must be applied in novel ways for improving the simplicity" (p.160) [5]. ...
... To overcome the complexity and to achieve simplicity is, paradoxically, a result of massively complex ideation. As it is difficult to do simple, as Mühlhäuser (2007) states "mastering the simplicity paradox will be deterministic for product success" (p.158) and IT "must be applied in novel ways for improving the simplicity" (p.160) [5]. ...
The main purpose of the study is to determine how transforming power of IOT may affect the unique system of knowledge of the industrial design field in terms of legitimacy, practice, and education. The investigation is based on the larger question of whether IOT functions as transducer on jurisdictional boundaries of field and how the new tasks and work activities of industrial design field may response in general. Answering these questions will bring community closer to understanding of the need of a different designer formulation, a possible sub-field within the design discipline and ways of how future practitioners and to strengthen their career lifespan.
... This manifests in different, partly competing, partly complementary visions, which provide for the IT-based linking of products to an "Internet of Things" (IoT) and, in addition to the consumer goods sector, also aim at the transformation of industrial production in the sense of an "Industry 4.0" (Lasi et al., 2014). A further concept for the implementation of these visions is the "Smart Product", which, in addition to the pure recording and transmission of data, also includes data processing and the ability to make independent decisions and take independent action (Beverungen et al., 2017;Mühlhäuser, 2007). This can take place either purely autonomously, which is already extensively researched in many applications, such as "autonomous driving" (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014), or partially autonomously, which makes the Smart Product an element of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS), in which man and machine jointly contribute to the fulfillment of a task. ...
... For example, authors associate "smartness" with the ability to recognize and predict deviations from error-free operation (Allmendinger and Lombreglia, 2005;Tien, 2015). Mühlhäuser defines "Smart Products" as an object (in the sense of a concrete product, service or software) which adapts to its environment (Mühlhäuser, 2007). Mühlhäuser focuses on simplifying the exchange between products and their users or other products. ...
... Mühlhäuser focuses on simplifying the exchange between products and their users or other products. This simplification opens up the "Smart Product" by offering product functions that are selected context-adaptively on the basis of their situational relevance (Mühlhäuser, 2007). In order to map such functions in a product, Smart Products must be able to perceive their environment, identify situational patterns with the help of the collected data in the sense of an "adaptive system" and finally proactively make relevant information available on the basis of the identified context (Mühlhäuser, 2007). ...
The collection and use of data are of increasing importance not only in virtual worlds but also for real goods. New products operationalize this principle and integrate sensors, actuators and microcomputers into analog products to enable sophisticated features such as context-awareness or connectivity with other devices. The underlying concept is being discussed as "Smart Product" and aims for the automation of activities, right up to autonomization of entire products. This article raises design specifications from existing literature and instantiates Smart Products in sailing. We discuss the application of the design specifications with sailing professionals in order to evaluate its practical value and to identify further benefits. The results affirmed that sailboats can be transformed into Smart Products by the integration of information technology. However, it also turned out that additional benefits can only be tapped by the integration of further stakeholders in a systemic perspective.
... Intelligent products are also referred to as Smart Products by some authors [46,48,[53][54][55][56][57]. Intelligent or Smart products may take part as components of a Cyber Physical System, due to their IoT 'connected' capability [58][59][60]. ...
... Mühlhäuser [53] provides a definition of smart products in this work along with the term 'active knowledge' referring to the capability to exhibit autonomous behaviours when such products are in use by humans. ...
While the move towards Industry 4.0 has motivated a re-evaluation of how a manufacturing organization should operate in light of the availability of a new generation of digital production equipment, the new emphasis is on human worker inclusion to provide decision making activities or physical actions (at decision nodes) within an otherwise automated process flow; termed by some authors as Industry 5.0 and seen as related to the earlier Japanese Society 5.0 concept (seeking to address wider social and environmental problems with the latest developments in digital system, artificial Intelligence and automation solutions). As motivated by the EU the Industry 5.0 paradigm can be seen as a movement to address infrastructural resilience, employee and environmental concerns in industrial settings. This is coupled with a greater awareness of environmental issues, especially those related to Carbon output at production and throughout manufactured products lifecycle. This paper proposes the concept of dynamic Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), enabled by the functionality possible with intelligent products. A particular focus of this paper is that of human in the loop assisted decision making for end-of-life disassembly of products and the role intelligent products can perform in achieving sustainable reuse of components and materials. It is concluded by this research that intelligent products must provide auditable data to support the achievement of net zero carbon and circular economy goals. The role of the human in moving towards net zero production, through the increased understanding and arbitration powers over information and decisions, is paramount; this opportunity is further enabled through the use of intelligent products.
... Cyber-physical systems with a certain degree of autonomy and the capabilities to communicate most likely over specific networks (e.g., internet) and to interact with different stakeholders (Tomiyama et al., 2019;Porter and Heppelmann, 2015;Mühlhäuser, 2008) are discussed as smart products as shown in Figure 1 below. These products often are integrated into heterogeneous smart environments (Mühlhäuser, 2008) to maximize customer value by connecting and integrating various smart products, services and connecting infrastructures with each other. ...
... Cyber-physical systems with a certain degree of autonomy and the capabilities to communicate most likely over specific networks (e.g., internet) and to interact with different stakeholders (Tomiyama et al., 2019;Porter and Heppelmann, 2015;Mühlhäuser, 2008) are discussed as smart products as shown in Figure 1 below. These products often are integrated into heterogeneous smart environments (Mühlhäuser, 2008) to maximize customer value by connecting and integrating various smart products, services and connecting infrastructures with each other. Furthermore, Tomiyama et al. (2019) describe characteristics where smart products distinguish themselves from conventional products through different characteristic capabilities. ...
Due to the increasing smartization of products and the ecosystems in which they are typically embedded, holistic considerations of future value-added systems are becoming increasingly important. This also determines fundamentally new challenges for the engineering of the future's smart Products. In order to be able to address the increasingly fuzzy system boundaries associated with this, this contribution introduces a System of Systems Engineering Lifecycle Concept considering smart products and services as core components of connected System of Systems ecosystems. Main characteristics of smart products and system of systems are discussed and in a real existing scenario of a sustainable landfill the presented System of Systems Engineering Lifecycle Concept is used as a System of Systems Framework for the given Use-Case.
... Human mind and sensorium can be restructured, in such way that new equipments become incorporated in the acting, sensing and thinking (Gallagher and Zahavi 2020;Clark 2010). Some intelligent machines exhibit features such as adaptability, self-learning, self-organization, self-coordination, and self-optimization, allowing them to be embedded into different environments so as to interact naturally with people, contribute to the creation of new life scenarios, and change the way we use and recognize products (Mühlhäuser 2007). ...
The advent of the posthuman era has blurred the boundary between the body and artifacts. Further, external materials and information are more deeply integrated into the body, making emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI), a key driving force for shaping posthuman existence and promoting bodily evolution. Based on this, this study analyses the transformation process of three technological forms, namely tools, machines, and cyborgs, and reveals the construction of bodies and artifacts. From the phenomenological perspective, the essences of body and artifact existences are reflected upon, and the ‘existence is construction’ viewpoint is proposed. Furthermore, a technological design concept, ‘bodioid’, is proposed to meticulously depict the characteristics of integrating similarities and differences toward unity between the body and artifacts, based on the theoretical foundation of technological mediation and the materialization of morality. Finally, through analogising the organizational form of language, the two key forms and specific mechanisms of ‘bodioid’ construction, namely ‘extension’ and ‘mirroring’, are indicated. Moreover, the posthuman existence landscape is discussed to provide theoretical insights into the study of the underlying philosophical principles of technological design.
... Considering IoT as a network of physical objects, these interconnected objects continuously collect, analyse, and utilize data to trigger action, providing valuable insights for planning, management, and decision-making [31]. Considering that all IoT devices are smart products [4] the current research delves into the conceptualisation of the term smart product, and it is taken as a reference by Mühlhäuser's [32] definition and the one adapted from him by the Smart Products Consortium [33] widely adopted by scholars: 'A smart product is an autonomous object which is designed for self-organised embedding into different environments in the course of its lifecycle and which allows for a natural product-to-human interaction. Smart products can proactively approach users using the sensing, input, and output capabilities of the environment, thus being self-, situational-, and context-aware. ...
As the number of Internet users grows, the increase in smart devices interconnected through the Internet of Things (IoT) have contributed to improvements in the functionality of everyday products and enhancement of user experience. Yet, they affect user privacy and render personal data more vulnerable. To foster a digital future fully aware of user privacy requirements, a line of design research emerges that focuses on balancing product innovation with user data protection. This matter relates to sociocultural, economic, and technological aspects, and its core is a human-centered design strategy. Still, there is a gap in academic research oriented towards guiding product developers on how to consider personal data privacy concerns when designing honest IoT devices. To define this gap and delve deeper into this relevant topic, this paper presents a systematic literature review of recent academic research using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method. This review focuses on prevalent research topics such as data privacy, personal data, data surveillance, and user behaviour in IoT. The result is a state-of-the-art compilation of 45 scientific studies mapping the most relevant concepts and approaches for product development in the last ten years of research, aligned with some central research questions. The Discussion and Conclusion sections provide a deep understanding of the complexity of the fast-changing landscape of privacy and personal data management using IoT products. Finally, this study proposes future academic research directions devoted to providing product designer specific, specialised help from different (yet interconnected) scientific approaches.
... In addition, the primary criterion in both products (SCP and SP) is context awareness. First, the Context-Awareness specification can be seen as an "Intelligence" product related to context awareness, emphasizing information gathering using sensor technologies, according to [36]. Furthermore, personalization requirements are associated with product user demands adaptation (product adaptation from the user's perspective). ...
The Industry 4.0 concept is a new manufacturing approach that integrates smart factories, smart machines, smart systems, smart production, and smart processes into a unified network. Through applying CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) technology, Industry 4.0 combines the physical and virtual worlds to increase company productivity and efficiency. This paper aims to explore research trends related to smart (connected) products in the Industry 4.0 era and find studies that can be developed in the future using a systematic literature review (SLR). The results of the SLR show that from 57 papers, it was found that product engineering and CPS technology were the aspects of the study that were mainly carried out. New research potentials that can be developed in the future have been identified in product engineering, smart factory, and standardization studies. Future research on SCP can be applied to the case of electric motorcycles swappable battery (EMSB).
... The advanced products consist of IT-based products (Mühlhäuser, 2008), such as SMS banking, mobile banking, or internet banking, officeless financial services, other IT-based activities through media connected to the BPRS system, bancassurance with distribution business model, bancassurance with integration business model. Other advanced products are products that could influence the assessment of BPRS' risk profile, such as foreign exchange activity, safe deposit box service, cooperation with IT-based saving and financing service with the channeling business model, as well as products that require permission from other authorities such as issuance of payment instruments using a card or without a card, and activity of other payment system services. ...
The Return on Asset (ROA) value of Islamic rural banks (BPRS) keeps decreasing during the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically from 2020 to 2021. The ROA value of Sharia Commercial Bank and Sharia Business Unit also decreased in 2020 but increased in 2021. During the pandemic, many financial institutions were in trouble, but BPRS was still able to survive in the midst of a crisis. This phenomenon attracted some scholars to study the factors that made BPRS survive during a pandemic. This study aims to analyze the effect of internal and external factors on Islamic rural banks’ profitability from the second quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2022. The sample used consisted of 134 Islamic rural banks with complete data to be analyzed. This study used panel data regression with ROA as the dependent variable. The result of regression shows that partially, FDR has a positive impact on ROA, whereas NPF and OER hurt ROA. On the other hand, CAR, GDP, and CPI have no impact on ROA. The finding shows that the internal factors of the BPRS have an important role in dealing with crises during a pandemic. The government is expected to support the digital transformation of BPRS in order to increase the efficiency and convenience of BPRS, so the public is attracted to join BPRS.
... The digitization of tourism databases such as the introduction of natural and human tourism resources, maps of tourist attractions, systems of restaurants, hotels, transportation systems... of each locality, each country is being widely deployed, bringing convenience to managers, tourism businesses, and visitors around the world. Smart products are products that are capable of computing, storing data, and communicating and interacting with their environment (Miche et al., 2009;Mühlhäuser et al., 2008) [7,8] . Industry 4.0 implies a huge increase in the variety, volume, and velocity of data creation (Lee et al., 2014), Industry 4.0 implies a huge increase in the variety, volume, and velocity of data creation and capacity to deliver information. ...
... The innovative approach should bring a novel learning process not only for all members of the design team but also for stakeholders in a broad context covering the whole process. Smart products are often defined as products -regularly completed by services -having digitalized solutions as leading attributes or, smart products have to be considered in the context of their (typically smart) environment [5]. Authors tend to reinterpret the definition of smart products from a product development perspective by identifying the smart attributive as a basis of the development process, besides the optional digital features. ...
The paper intends to demonstrate the functional role and application of methods provided by the design thinking mindset when the team should create an innovative product design concept in a multidiscipline environment. First, the essential description and features of a design thinking mindset are significant for the discussed topic are introduced, along with defining the specialties and expected output of the featured smart furniture project. Second, after a clear view of the applicable mindset, the paper aims to sketch the project scope by reasoning the applied design thinking methods and highlighting the product design process’s challenges. Finally, the article makes a definite conclusion for demonstrating the design thinking mindset's experienced application, completed by the detailed evaluation of research questions based on empirical data. The purpose of the article is, on the one hand, to highlight the role and significance of the design thinking mindset in an innovative project. On the other hand, emphasizing that well-chosen methods in the right team composition with a well-defined problem already carries the key to the solution. The paper's novelty is the detailed practical description confirmed by concrete results of successfully applied methods needed to design a clear vision and scope for a multidiscipline team by design thinking mindset.
... Technically, this can be achieved via the integration of advanced forms of AI, that is, so-called "strong AI" (De Bellis and Johar, 2020;Mühlhäuser, 2008;Verganti, Vendraminelli, and Iansiti, 2020). More precisely, intuitive intelligence enabled by deep learning and artificial neural networks may allow devices to reason creatively and to learn effectively from new situations as well as to adapt and to take autonomous actions as the environment changes (Huang and Rust, 2018;Novak and Hoffman, 2018). ...
Smart products have received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners alike. One limitation of the existing literature, however, is that the term is often used as a blanket term and that there is no consensus on what a smart product actually is. Because different studies rely on differing conceptualizations, the current body of knowledge is scattered and lacks a uniform language and conceptual boundaries. Specifically, existing research has subsumed inherently different products under one collective term, has relied on a multitude of ad‐hoc criteria to define smart products or has conflated smart products with the services they render and/or the wider ecosystem in which they operate. These developments limit the systematic advancement of the field and impede the integration of the smart product concept into related concepts such as the Internet of Things. To address these issues, this article provides an extensive analysis of the status quo of the field, with the goal of developing a common language and comprehensive conceptualization of smart products. First, existing studies on smart products were systematically reviewed across contributing disciplines and supplemented with a bibliometric analysis that allowed for a deeper understanding of the smart product concept within and across disciplines. This analysis revealed an initial set of 16 capability‐based criteria that are currently applied to conceptualize smart products. Second, based on a systematic coding procedure, these criteria were synthesized and organized within a comprehensive framework delineating four distinct product archetypes for the digital age: (1) Digital, (2) Connected, (3) Responsive and (4) Intelligent. Third, three major conceptual themes that arise from this framework are identified and possibilities for future research are pointed out. In sum, this work contributes to the literature by improving the understanding of smart products as an epistemic object and by laying the ground for more cumulative research endeavors.
... The third type of component is connectivity: connectivity components comprise, for example, ports, antennae and protocols, enabling Smart Products to connect to its operating environment (Porter and Heppelmann, 2014;Rijsdijk and Hultink, 2009). Smart Products can focus on three types of data collection for analysis (Mühlhäuser, 2007): (i) data on the smart product itself, for example its features and its status; (ii) data about its potential and current environments and (iii) data about its users. Moreover, Smart Products can be categorized according to their autonomy (Schweitzer and Van den Hende, 2016): Semiautonomous Smart Products need user interaction to function, while autonomous Smart Products have the capability to function and interact with other devices without human input. ...
Technological innovations are increasing the opportunities to develop technically and economically feasible Smart Products. However, the development of Smart Products requires knowledge and capabilities that single companies usually do not possess, thus creating new opportunities for cooperation through the establishment of innovation ecosystems focused on Smart Products. Hence, this study aims at understanding possible configurations for these ecosystems by considering the required characteristics they should display to allow the development of Smart Products from their early stages. We conducted a case study in an electro-electronic and automation industrial cluster of 120 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), based on 37 interviews with key participants in the ecosystem: 15 SMEs executives, 8 academics, 2 R&D center representatives, 8 large manufacturing customers, 3 business associations and 1 state government representative. As a result, we developed a conceptual framework that presents the required characteristics of an innovation ecosystem to offer Smart Products, and discloses the relationships among these characteristics.
... Aside from the challenges that they represent, digital technologies possess the capability of enabling sophisticated products, full of functionalities, but also provided with the intelligence to autonomously interact during their entire lifecycle [5], opening new possibilities of efficiency and flexibility to their production process. ...
Companies, and especially manufacturers, are facing today a truly complex scenario, with technology developing at a fast speed and demanding a digital transformation to face the many challenges. The aim of this paper then is to assess the fitness of digital maturity models in their role of assisting manufacturers of smart products in their digital transformation journeys and propose a set of recommendations to improve the usability of the tool in this scenario. To achieve this, an analysis of a selection of seven maturity models is performed, applying several design principles to the specific case of manufacturers of smart products. According to the most relevant findings, the recommendations suggested for the models are related to the need for a wider scope for the tool, a prescriptive condition, and a broad business perspective in the definition of their dimensions. Validation of the applicability of the recommendations in the small and medium enterprises scenario is also presented through an illustration of the manufacturers of the Arve Valley.
... The MAS is inspired by distributed artificial intelligence and it is composed of autonomous agents that collaborate and cooperate dynamically together to allow the creation of systems that are autonomous, reactive and proactive to achieve the desired objective [15,16]. Product driven control system (PDS) [17,18] (also called Smart product [19,20] or intelligent product [21,22]) is considered as DCS in which the product plays a major role in making a decision. The intelligent product participates in decision making by sharing information with other entities of the system, and it can apply its intelligence to trace its path on the shop floor during its lifecycle [22,23]. ...
Cyber-physical system (CPS) is considered as a building block of industry 4.0. They are formulated as a network of interacting cyberspace and physical elements. Dealing with this new industrial context, distributed control systems (DCS) are increasingly involved because they permit meeting flexibility and adaptability requirements, which can give scope to CPS. The product driven control system (PDS) is considered as DCS in which the product plays a major role in decision-making. However, the PDS paradigm has not yet received sufficient attention within the CPS. Relying on multi-agents system as implementation framework, radio frequency identity as auto-identity technologies, and hardware in the loop simulation as a practical methodology, the paper proposes a validation and practical framework of PDS applied to the highly automated flexible robotized assembly system. An efficient CPS is developed for a discrete flexible manufacturing system.
... According to definitions and descriptions of intelligent/smart products ( Kärkkäinen et al. 2003;Mcfarlane et al. 2003;Mühlhäuser 2007;Ventä 2007;Yang, Moore, and Chong 2009;Leitão et al. 2015), a smart product should contain the following properties: physical system (including hardware and software), cyber system, data, information, knowledge, and interaction/interfacing (Lee, Bagheri, and Kao 2015). These properties are varying along the product through-life phases (including design, production, delivery, service, maintenance and recycling) driven by its external environment interaction model. ...
With the advent of Industry 4.0, design of a smart product to work in a smart factory, or at home or city over its lifecycle has to consider its intelligent interaction with its external environment (physical, human and cyberspace environments). Thus, environment interaction-driven design of smart products becomes an important design research field, facing a huge challenge of integrating a smart product and its environment interaction design crossing all its life phases. In this paper, a high-profile design framework is proposed for guiding environment interaction model-driven smart products through-life design. It has three core elements: (1) a generic environment interaction model of a smart product through-life phases, which can help map out the interaction requirements between the smart product and other interaction elements through-life phases, (2) a smart product design process model for guiding product and its interaction design at each phase and (3) a design strategy of smart products through-life design. Its implementation feasibility is demonstrated with an industrial case study, showing that it is helpful to implement design solutions to a smart product for satisfying intelligent interactions with its external environments through-life phases.
... The case study concerned the manufacture of USB-OTG sticks (shown in Fig. 3) as a tractable but representative production line example. This production line has the classical characteristics of a smart product, as defined by Mühlhäuser [25]: ...
This paper demonstrates the flexible methodology of modelling cyber-physical systems (CPSs) using the INTO-CPS technology through co-simulation based on Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs). It explores a novel method with two main co-simulation phases: homogeneous and heterogeneous. In the first phase, high-level, abstract FMUs are produced for all subsystems using a single discrete-event formalism (the VDM-RT language and Overture tool). This approach permits early co-simulation of system-level behaviours and serves as a basis for dialogue between subsystem teams and agreement on interfaces. During the second phase, model refinements of subsystems are gradually introduced, using various simulation tools capable of exporting FMUs. This heterogeneous phase permits high-fidelity models of all subsystems to be produced in appropriate formalisms. This paper describes the use of this methodology to develop a USB stick production line, representing a smart system of systems. The experiments are performed under the assumption that the orders are received in a Gaussian or Uniform distribution. The focus is on the homogeneous co-simulation phase, for which the method demonstrates two important roles: first, the homogeneous phase identifies the right interaction protocols (signals) among the various subsystems, and second, the conceptual (system-level) parameters identified before the heterogeneous co-simulation phase reduce the huge size of the design space and create stable constraints, later reflected in the physical implementation.
... SMART Products are used to aid SMART Factories by equipping the products themselves with information and sensors [11]. This allows for machines and factories to constantly monitor production information from the products themselves. ...
... We analyzed and clustered few more designations to find out whether there are content-related differences or not. We found more than eleven various designations of smart products [9]. Besides smart product, there also exist designations like cyber physical or digital products. ...
Smartification and digital refinement of products to enable the design of smart ones is a pivotal challenge in the manufacturing industry. Companies fail to design smart products due to missing knowledge of digital technologies and their integral part in product development processes. This paper presents a methodology that enables the derivation of digital functions for smart products through selected cases in manufacturing usage. We develop a morphology that consists of digital functions for smartification. In this context, we explained and derived characteristics by a set of examples regarding smart products in the manufacturing industry. Our methodology reduces the time spent initiating a development project with the focus on smartification.
... Smart Products are mechatronic products that are additionally equipped with embedded systems enabling communication with other Smart Products using existing internet technologies [1,2]. ...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0216555.].
... Smart Products are mechatronic products that are additionally equipped with embedded systems enabling communication with other Smart Products using existing internet technologies [1,2]. ...
In the present work, the problem of food wastage and the concept of sustainability are studied. An analysis of Life Cycle Assessment as a tool and of the innovative concept of Cradle to Cradle is also carried out, together with an exhaustive comparison of these two approaches. Based on these concepts, an integrated methodology is proposed for the design of interconnected smart products. The smart packaging systems currently available are studied theoretically and a practical case is analysed using the proposed methodology through the design and Life Cycle Assessment of a smart interconnected container that is able to detect the ethylene emitted by climacteric fruit, thereby minimizing food wastage. For the case under study, a major impact is observed of the selected plastics in the resources category, and of the smart system in the human health category.
... According to Cook et al. [15], a Smart Environment is a small world where all kinds of smart devices are continuously working to make inhabitants' lives more comfortable. Mühlhäuser [16] defines smart, connected products (SCP) as "entities (tangible object, software, or service) designed and made for self-organized embedding into different (smart) environments in the course of its lifecycle, providing improved simplicity and openness through improved connections". SCP have three core components: physical, smart, and connectivity components. ...
The research discussed the topic of the functional role of responsive materials in being elements of a functional transformation in the design of industrial products, based on the study of the structures of smart materials and their performance capabilities at the level of action and self-reaction that characterize this type of materials. Basic features of responsive materials have been identified to be elements of self-functional insertion into the industrial product design, which contributes to raising the efficiency and functional capacity of the industrial product and enhancing the ability of products to perform self-acting interactions in the structural structure of the material structure of the product and its ability to respond and interact with context variables. environmental. The responsive materials were classified into: electrical insulating materials, ceramics, piezoelectric polymers, shape memory alloys, shape memory polymers, thermoelectric materials, and electrical and magnetic fluids. And according to the cognitive propositions of research and discussion of methods and types of performance application of the characteristics of self-response materials in the design of industrial products that have the ability to self-response, a number of scientific conclusions were reached, which were, in their entirety, a scientific analysis of what and how of the design application of the characteristics of responsive materials in creating new functions in Industrial product design.
The paper compares the effectiveness of selected machine learning methods as modelling tools supporting the selection of a packaging type in new product development process. The main goal of the developed model is to reduce the risk of failure in compatibility tests which are preformed to ensure safety, durability, and efficacy of the finished product for the entire period of its shelf life and consumer use. This kind of testing is mandatory inter alia for all aerosol packaging as any mechanical alterations of the packaging can cause the pressurized product to unseal and stop working properly. Moreover, aerosol products are classified as dangerous goods and any leaking of the product or propellent can be a serious hazard to the storage place, environment, and final consumer. Thus, basic compatibility observations of metal aerosol packaging (i.e. general corrosion, pitting corrosion, coating blistering or detinning) and different compatibility factors (e.g. formula ingredients, water contamination, pH, package material and coatings) were discussed. Artificial intelligence methods applied in the design process can reduce the lengthy testing time as well as developing costs and help benefit from the knowledge and experience of technologists stored in historical data in databases.
In the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), a model-based approach can be an efficient way to master system complexity through an iterative development. In this chapter we illustrate how a co-simulation technology can be used to gradually increase the detail in a collaborative model (co-model) following a “discrete event first” (DE-first) methodology. In this approach, initial abstract models are produced using a discrete-event formalism (in this case VDM) to identify the proper communication interfaces and interaction protocols among different models. These are gradually replaced by more detailed models using appropriate technologies, for example continuous time models of physical phenomena. The case study deals with the virtual design and validation of a CPS-based manufacturing system for assembling USB sticks. It is a representative example of part of a distributed and heterogeneous system in which products, manufacturing resources, orders and infrastructure are all cyber-physical. In this setting, several features (such as asynchronous communication, messages flow, autonomy, and self-adaptation) should be investigated at design time, for example using a collaborative modelling approach. Consequently, the case study offers a balance between being sufficiently simple to be easily followed as a production line example, including generating a tangible output, and at the same time being sufficiently general to allow the study of the co-simulation complexity.
Amaç: Endüstri 4.0 ile hızlı bir dijitalleşme süreci emek yoğun işletmeler le birlikte tüm işletmeler için kaçınılmaz olmuştur. Öte yandan geleneksel iş etüdü teknikleri verimlilik ölçüm ve izlemede oldukça kritik bir role sahiptir. Bu çalışmada iş etüdü tekniklerinin dijitalleşme sürecindeki rolü ve değişimine yönelik bir araştırma ve değerlendirme yapılması amaçlanmıştır.
Yöntem: İlgili değerlendirmeyi yapmak için ele alınan tekniklere ilişkin kapsamlı literatür araştırması ve gerçek dünya örneklerinin incelenmesi şeklinde bir yol izlenmiştir.
Bulgular: Dijitalleşen iş süreçleri karşısında iş etüdü tekniklerinin gösterdiği tepki incelendiğinde, geleneksel tekniklerinin bu dönüşüm sürecine büyük oranda adapte olduğu söylenebilir. Endüstri devriminde işletmelerin dijitalleşmesinde kritik rol oynayan yapay zekâ tekniklerinin iş ölçümü tekniklerindeki dijitalleşmeyi de tetiklediği görülmektedir. Dahası, geleneksel iş etüdü tekniklerinin, işletmelerin Endüstri 4.0’a geçiş süreçlerinde ortaya çıkan ihtiyaçlarına yapay zekâ ve Endüstri 4.0 ile birlikte gelen diğer dijital teknikler ile bütünleşerek uyum sağladığı görülmektedir.
Özgünlük: Üretim ortamlarındaki dijital dönüşüm süreçlerinin geleneksel iş etüdü teknikleri üzerindeki etkisinin incelenmesi, değişimin analiz edilmesi, bununla birlikte ilgili tekniklere yönelik bir gelecek projeksiyonunun sunulması bu çalışmayı özgün kılmaktadır.
Produktbegleitende Dienstleistungen haben für den deutschen Maschinen- und Anlagenbau an Bedeutung gewonnen. Die digitale Durchdringung von Produkten und Dienstleistungen eröffnet in diesem Kontext die Möglichkeit, den Kunden in die Dienstleistungserbringung zu integrieren und die globale Erbringungsgeschwindigkeit und -qualität im After-Sales-Geschäft zu erhöhen. Gleichermaßen gehen damit Anforderungen an die Flexibilisierung klassischer Angebote und die zugrunde liegenden Geschäftsmodelle einher. Serviceplattformen bieten in diesem Zusammenhang die Möglichkeit, verschiedene Akteure, Produkte und Services zu integrieren, und offerieren einen Lösungsraum, der die Entwicklung sowie kundenindividuelle Konfiguration und Erbringung von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie (IKT)-gestützten Dienstleistungen ermöglicht. In diesem Beitrag werden die Konzeption und Entwicklung einer solchen Serviceplattform sowie die IKT-gestützte Dienstleistungserbringung untersucht, um Chancen und Herausforderungen zu eruieren. Die in diesem Abschlussbericht dokumentierten Ergebnisse basieren auf dem dreijährigen Forschungsprojekt smartTCS, in dem das Konzept einer Smart-Service-Plattform untersucht und prototypisch umgesetzt wurde.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing all aspects of human activity. Impact on Tourism such as an increase in customer expectations, improvement of product quality, innovation of cooperation and organizational form. Customers are at the heart of the economy, improving the way customers are served. Products and services are enhanced with digital capabilities. New technology makes travel services fast and flexible, information and data are updated continuously and widely. Customer experience, data-driven services through analytics demand new forms of collaboration, at a fast pace. This article presents the impacts of Industry 4.0 on world tourism as well as Vietnam tourism and proposes implications for tourism development in Phu Quoc in this revolutionary era.
Though they can be traced back to different roots, both smart design and smart systems have to do with the recent developments of artificial intelligence. There are two major questions related to them: (i) What way are smart design and smart systems enabled by artificial narrow, general, or super intelligence? and (ii) How can smart design be used in the realization of smart systems? and How can smart systems contribute to smart designing? A difficulty is that there are no exact definitions for these novel concepts in the literature. The endeavor to analyze the current situation and to answer the above questions stimulated an exploratory research whose first findings are summarized in this paper. Its first part elaborates on a plausible interpretation of the concept of smartness and provides an overview of the characteristics of smart design as a creative problem solving methodology supported by artificial intelligence. The second part exposes the paradigmatic features and system engineering issues of smart systems, which are equipped with application-specific synthetic system knowledge and reasoning mechanisms. The third part presents and elaborates on a conceptual model of AI-based couplings of smart design and smart systems. The couplings may manifest in various concrete forms in real life that are referred to as “connectors” in this paper. The principal types of connectors are exemplified and discussed. It has been found that smart design tends to manifest as a methodology of blue-printing smart systems and that smart systems will be intellectualized the enablers of implementation of smart design. Understanding the affordances of and creating proper connectors between smart design and smart systems need further explorative research.
http://ojs.francoangeli.it/_omp/index.php/oa/catalog/book/641
This present book covers a series of outstanding reputation researchers’ contributions on the topic of ICS Materials: a new class of emerging materials with properties and qualities concerning interactivity, connectivity and intelligence. In the general framework of ICS Materials’ domain, each chapter deals with a specific aspect following the characteristic perspective of each researcher. As result, methods, tools, guidelines emerged that are relevant and applicable to several contexts such as product, interaction design, materials science and many more.
The world is flat, hot and crowded but also it is connected [1]. The generalized use of technologies such as Internet, mobile technologies, cloud computing, big data analytics, cyber-physical systems, digital systems and sensors leads to a connected world. In this chapter, you will be able to understand the new challenges faced by a connected world supposed to be supported by intelligent system to enhance living standards of people around the planet.
In recent years, with the shrinkage of technological components, increasing processing capacities, and decreasing production costs, many different technologies have started to be included in the content of consumer products. This situation transforms the products, which are the object of design, into radical transformations both in content and form. Internet of Things, one of the most important of these technologies, describes mainly a communication network in which objects are involved, and consumer products constitute an important part of this system. This study aims to examine the Internet of Things, which is mostly discussed by engineering and computer science in the literature, from the perspective of product design. The reasons, forms, and results of the integration of IOT into consumer products are addressed in the context of products, user, designer, and design activity. The aim of this study is to reveal the fundamentals and properties of the new product paradigm that emerges from the intersection of design and technology as a result of the integration of IOT technologies into physical products, to understand the structure and current state of IOT product universe and to reveal the effects of IOT technology integration on product design. For this purpose, a three-stage study consisting of literature review, product analysis and interviews with professionals was structured and conducted. 700 IOT products released to the market have been subjected to qualitative content analysis by considering the conceptual framework revealed from the literature review. As a result of the analysis, the technology-based quality model and the effects of IOT integration on products in terms of functionality and user-product interaction have been demonstrated; the IOT product universe is conceptually classified according to the framework of the content analysis. The effects of IOT technology integration on final product forms were evaluated through interviews with professionals over product samples with representative capability selected from the IoT product universe, and card grouping sessions were conducted to test the classification revealed through product analysis by the professionals, and the classification was verified.
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Supply Chains (SC) has become a popular topic, there is a distinct lack of conceptual frameworks with which to categorise and review how various sub-topics of AI can help in various sub-fields of Supply Chain Management (SCM). To address this gap, we conceptualise the new topic of "SC AI" through a human-mimicking Intelligent Agent that exhibits "smart" SC behaviour. We then develop a number of SC AI capability blocks for the Intelligent Agent, and review and synthesise studies to date within these capability blocks. We conclude by highlighting a number of industrial use cases and extant challenges reported in literature that need to be tackled to move this exciting new field forward. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on Supply Chains (SC) has recently become a popular topic of discussion prone to hype, hope and fear (The Economist, 2018). A recent study proposes that purchasing managers are at a 64% risk of losing their job due to automation, while buyers are at a 64% risk (Frey et al 2016). In industries where purchasing costs can amount to over 50% of total costs (Gadde and Håkansson, 2001), automation can become a key contributor to profit margins, making it an attractive option. AI, also called Machine Intelligence or Computational Intelligence, is used to describe machines that mimic and improve human cognitive functions that we associate with human intelligence, such as learning and problem solving. The field of computer science often conceptualises AI with "Intelligent Agents", which are computational programs that mimic and then act on behalf of a human user. Intelligent agents "sense" and "perceive" the environment they are in, and take actions to maximise the probability of achieving their "goals". They can use various tools to do so, including the ability to learn from data (Machine learning), develop reasoning (Logic), communicate and negotiate with other agents (Multi-agent systems), evolve to adopt to
Recently, Internet-based devices have evolved into platforms for new networks, with Internet of Things technology being applied in various areas. The expansion of scope of this technology and exchange of real-time information enables users to check their content whenever. The real-time Internet of Things motion detection platform has been developed to detect and monitor users in installed spaces. In this article, the real-time Internet of Things motion detection platform utilizes a non-contact sensor module and motion recovery printed circuit board module to quickly respond to emergency situations through real-time monitoring. This is visualized on the display by sending data extracted from the motion recovery printed circuit board module combined with open source hardware by the non-contact sensor module receiving information from smartphone users. The administrator’s display continuously analyzes real-time moving objects by detecting them with respect to location coordinates and providing automatically recognized data to the cloud server. In addition, real-time Internet of Things motion detection monitoring system was configured to quickly respond to real-time alerts and effectively manage problems. Therefore, installing real-time Internet of Things motion detection platform at an actual site will enable quick resolving of emergency situations through information provision and user awareness monitoring.
Smart Connected Products play a central role in the transformation environment of Industry 4.0. The innovative use of Smart Connected Products (SCPs) and the associated “smart” services can disruptively change the competitive conditions, the business model and the strategy of companies. Therefore, their development and use have a significant impact on the business environment of manufacturers, service providers, and users of SCPs. From the manufacturer's perspective, the successful development and positioning of an SCP in the market is essential.
However, the success of these devices in the market depends on numerous factors.
This master thesis aims to develop recommendations for action and guidelines for the manufacturers of SCPs. Since consultants and technology suppliers are often involved in the product development, recommendations are also made that are relevant for these companies.
Industry 4.0 has recently been used as a synonym for the planned fourth Industrial Revolution, comparable to the radical transformations from the first Industrial Revolution toward “Mechanization” (Industry 1.0) and its subsequent second one toward “Electrification” (Industry 2.0) to the third Industrial Revolution toward “Digitization” (Industry 3.0). Product design accompanied by the industrial and technological developments has also evolved from “Design for mechanical production” (Design 1.0) and “Design for mass production” (Design 2.0) to a systemic paradigm shift toward “human considerations” and “environmental concerns” (Design 3.0). The concept of Industry 4.0 describes the trend toward digitalization, networklization, and intellectualization of the production environment, enabling industries to plan and project a product’s entire value chain over its lifecycle. As such, a critical issue to both academia and industry is to ponder what will be the next design evolution (i.e., Design 4.0) in response to the initiative of Industry 4.0. Through a comprehensive review of current technological development, this study proposes a new perspective on total product-service design (TPSD), the purpose of which is to develop a practical methodology to facilitate the design and development of innovative products.
This contribution introduces an approach for the optimization of smart products and systems in the early development phases through a Closed-Loop Systems Engineering approach. This approach – holistic in terms of considering the overall system and its usage context, interdisciplinary, overreaching multiple lifecycle phases, and supported methodologically as well as tool-wise – combines aspects from both Model-Based Systems Engineering and Product resp. System Lifecycle Management to optimize the system by using advanced verification and validation methods and techniques, in particular Model-, Twin- and System-in-the-Loop, and seamless feedback of product usage data to the early development phase. This approach has been prototypically applied at the example of a test bed of an autonomous construction area system of systems.
The status of Smart Home Appliances (SHAs) in the smart home industry has been raised as major components of a smart home. To design a good SHA, diverse stakeholders in the smart home ecosystem need to have a common understanding of smart homes and SHAs. However, the studies on what they are, especially those reflecting practitioners’ point of view, have been scarce.
In this research, we conducted systematic literature reviews and practitioner interviews using the concept mapping method to identify the attributes of SHAs depending both on academia and industry. In addition, we suggest a framework of the smart home ecosystem which describes how those attributes are revealed in the relationships among SHAs, users, and external stakeholders.
Since all of the interviewees are Korean SHA development professionals, the findings from this research could have been limited to the current status of the Korean SHA industry. Nonetheless, we expect that this research would contribute to building a consensus on what smart homes and SHAs are and provide the designers and developers of SHAs with systematic perspectives on smart homes.
Das Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrages ist es aufzuzeigen, auf Basis wel- cher Klassifizierungsmerkmale IIoT-Technologien zukünftig systemati- siert werden können, um diese etwa weiterführend in konkreten Schu- lungssituationen zur Kompetenzentwicklung involvierter Mitarbeiter zielorientiert einsetzen zu können. Dazu wird in einem ersten Schritt auf jene Kompetenzfacetten aufmerksam gemacht, welche in ihrer Gesamtheit bei kontextsensitiver Ausgestaltung zum Erhalt der Hand- lungsfähigkeit der Mitarbeiter im Spiegel neuer Aufgabenprofile beitra- gen. In einem darauf folgenden, den Kern des Beitrages darstellenden zweiten Schritt werden mittels Literaturanalyse und „Praxischeck“ jene Klassifizierungsmerkmale von IIoT-Technologien identifiziert, welche die Gesamtheit möglicher Ausprägungen von IIoT-Technologien um- fassen und diese hinsichtlich praktischer Einordnung in den Blick neh- men. Besonderes Augenmerk wird auf jene Anwendungen gelegt, die sich durch eine starke Nähe zu praktischen „hands-on“ Tätigkeiten auf dem shopfloor auszeichnen. Im konkreten Fall werden hierbei sog. mobile IIoT-Technologien fokussiert. Der Vorschlag zur Systematisie- rung kann zur zukünftigen Einordnung neuer Technologien herangezo- gen werden und bietet sich als Ausgangsbasis für aufbauende Weiter- verwendungen an. Abschließend werden bestehende didaktische Her- ausforderungen im Spiegel der Kompetenzentwicklung von Mitarbei- tern dargelegt. Auf Basis der vorherigen Ausarbeitungen wird ein Lern- szenario im Spiegel erwachsenenorientierter Lehre positioniert und aufgezeigt, wie ausgewählte und systematisierte Technologien einge- setzt werden können, um relevante Kompetenzen zu schulen. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Zusammenfassung und einem Ausblick.
This paper presents the concept of smart virtual product development (SVPD) system capable of supporting industrial product development process. It enhances the decision making process during different stages and activities involved in product development i.e. product design, manufacturing, and its inspection planning. The enhancement is achieved by using the explicit knowledge of formal past decision events, which are captured, stored, and recalled in the form of set of experiences. The basic description and principle of the approach are introduced first, and then the porotype version of the system is developed and tested. Working of the design knowledge management module of the system is demonstrated with the case study, which verifies the feasibility of the proposed approach. The presented system successfully supports smart product design and it can play a vital role in Industry 4.0 development.
The spoken dialog industry has reached a ma- turity characterized by a vertical structure of technology vendors, platform integrators, ap- plication developers, and hosting companies. At the same time industrial standards are per- vading the underlying technology and provid- ing higher and higher levels of interoperability. On one hand commercial dia- log systems are largely based on a pragmatic approach which aims at usability and task completion. On the other hand, spoken dialog research has been moving on a parallel path trying to attain naturalness and freedom of communication. However, the evolution of the commercial path shows that naturalness and freedom of expression are not necessarily a prerequisite for usability, given the constraints of the current technology. The difference be- tween the two goals has been influencing a parallel evolution of the architectures and in particular of the dialog management abstrac- tions. We believe it is the time to get a high level perspective on both lines of work, and aim to a synergistic convergence.
We propose a learning and prediction based paradigm for designing smart home environments. The foundation of this paradigm lies in information theory as it manages uncertainties of the inhabitants' contexts (e.g., locations or activities) in daily lives. The idea is to build compressed dictionaries of context-aware data collected from sensors and devices monitoring and/or controlling the smart environment, efficiently learn from these profiles, and finally predict inhabitant's future contexts. Successful prediction helps automate device control operations and tasks within the environment as well as to identify anomalies. Thus, the learning and prediction based paradigm optimizes such goal functions of smart environments as minimizing maintenance cost, manual interactions and energy utilization. After identifying important features of smart environments, we present an overview of our MavHome architecture and apply the proposed paradigm to the inhabitant's location and activity tracking and prediction, and automated decision-making capability.
With advances in sensor-based computing and mobile communication, people have started to explore ubiquitous or pervasive computing systems that aim to have computing devices literally available everywhere, making them disappear into the physical environ-ment. Novel ubiquitous computing applications such as intelligent vehicles, smart buildings, and traffic management have special properties that traditional computing applications do not possess, such as context-awareness, massive decentralisation, autonomous behaviour, adaptivity, proactivity, and innate collaboration. In this paper we argue that such appli-cations require a new computational model and middleware that can reflect the autonomy and spontaneity of cooperative entities. The EU funded CORTEX 1 project proposes the sentient object model to support the construction of such large-scale applications. We re-port on a flexible, run-time reconfigurable component based middleware that we have used to engineer the sentient object programming paradigm. We demonstrate the appropriate-ness of the novel computational model and validity of the middleware by constructing a proof of concept demonstrator based on the notion of autonomous cooperating vehicles.
In this paper, we present an extension of our OWL-S service composition planner OWLS-XPlan that allows for quasi-online re-planning of composite OWL-S services without full restart of the actual planning process, and preliminary experimental evaluation results.
One of the main challenges in ubiquitous computing is mak- ing users interact with computing appliances in an easy and natural manner. In this paper we discuss how to turn or- dinary devices into Smart Products that are more intuitive to use and are self-explanatory. We present a general archi- tecture and a distributed runtime environment for building such Smart Products and discuss a number of user inter- action issues. As an example, we describe our smart coee machine and its validation through systematic user testing.
The technological evolution is making multimodal technology available to the mass market with increased reliability. However, developing multimodal interfaces is still difficult and there is a lack of authoring tools for this purpose, especially when multi-device environments are addressed. In this paper, we present a method and a supporting tool for authoring user interfaces with various ways to combine graphics and voice in multi-device environments. The tool is based on the use of logical descriptions and provides designers and developers with support to manage the underlying complexity, make and modify design choices, and exploit the possibilities offered by multimodality.
In this paper we present PENG-D, a proposal for a controlled natural language that can be used for expressing knowledge about resources in the Semantic Web and for specifying on- tologies in a human-readable way. After a brief overview of the main Semantic Web en- abling technologies (and their deficiencies), we will show how statements and rules written in PENG-D are related to (a subset of) RDFS and OWL and how this knowledge can be translated into an expressive fragment of first-order logic. The resulting information can then be further processed by third-party reasoning services and queried in PENG-D.
The Semantic Web proposes the mark-up of content on the Web using formal ontologies that structure underlying data for the purpose of comprehensive and transportable machine understanding. Semantic Web Services: Theory, Tools and Applications brings contributions from researchers, scientists from both industry and academia, and representatives from different communities to study, understand, and explore the theory, tools, and applications of the Semantic Web. Semantic Web Services: Theory, Tools and Applications binds computing involving the Semantic Web, ontologies, knowledge management, Web services, and Web processes into one fully comprehensive resource, serving as the platform for exchange of both practical technologies and far reaching research.
We propose a learning and prediction based paradigm for designing smart home environments. The foundation of this paradigm
lies in information theory as it manages uncertainties of the inhabitants’ contexts (e.g., locations or activities) in daily
lives. The idea is to build compressed dictionaries of context-aware data collected from sensors and devices monitoring and/or
controlling the smart environment, efficiently learn from these profiles, and finally predict inhabitant’s future contexts.
Successful prediction helps automate device control operations and tasks within the environment as well as to identify anomalies.
Thus, the learning and prediction based paradigm optimizes such goal functions of smart environments as minimizing maintenance
cost, manual interactions and energy utilization. After identifying important features of smart environments, we present an
overview of our MavHome architecture and apply the proposed paradigm to the inhabitant’s location and activity tracking and
prediction, and automated decision-making capability.
Smart Environments contains contributions from leading researchers, describing techniques and issues related to developing and living in intelligent environments. Reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of the design of smart environments, the topics covered include the latest research in smart environment philosophical and computational architecture considerations, network protocols for smart environments, intelligent sensor networks and powerline control of devices, and action prediction and identification.
Despite a large body of multidisciplinary research on helpful and user-orientedinterface design, help facilities found in most commercial software are so ill-conceived thatthey are often ‘unhelpful’. From a wide spectrum of disciplines and software tools, we presentan extensive review of related work, identifying their limitations as well as their most prom-isingaspects. Using this material, we attempt to recapitulate the necessary requirements foruseful help systems.
Ergonomic man-machine interface incorporating adaptive pattern recognition
- S Hoffberg
- L Hoffberg-Borghesani