The Digitalization Principles from a User- Centered Design Perspective: A Conceptual Framework for Smart Product Development

The industry relies on interdisciplinarity to promote advancements. The diverse engineering domains, information technologies, management and social sciences are combined in the industrial environment and oriented o society’s ever-changing demands. In parallel, the demographic shifts caused by population aging present room for innovation on many fronts, such as in health, technology, industry, products, and services, and in the same way in product development processes. In an attempt to tackle such issues, this article discusses how the addressing of the elderly population demands, particularly the demand for smart products, might be supported by the principles of production digitalization. In doing so, it proposes a conceptual framework for the development of smart products for the elderly, sustained by three core pillars: specific product lifecycle stages, Industrie 4.0 requirements for smart product development; and Industrie 4.0 enabling technologies which are integrated by the User-Centered Design philosophy. Their combination into a framework aims at addressing two main points: assist in the translation of elderly real consumers’ expectations and demands into more adequate, appealing products and in creating a transition path for companies who wish to incorporate the principles and technologies of production digitalization in their value chain. Furthermore, the article discusses how this proposal could be validated in the real industrial environment

The Digitalization Principles from a User- Centered Design Perspective: A Conceptual Framework for Smart Product Development

The industry relies on interdisciplinarity to promote advancements. The diverse engineering domains, information technologies, management and social sciences are combined in the industrial environment and oriented o society’s ever-changing demands. In parallel, the demographic shifts caused by population aging present room for innovation on many fronts, such as in health, technology, industry, products, and services, and in the same way in product development processes. In an attempt to tackle such issues, this article discusses how the addressing of the elderly population demands, particularly the demand for smart products, might be supported by the principles of production digitalization. In doing so, it proposes a conceptual framework for the development of smart products for the elderly, sustained by three core pillars: specific product lifecycle stages, Industrie 4.0 requirements for smart product development; and Industrie 4.0 enabling technologies which are integrated by the User-Centered Design philosophy. Their combination into a framework aims at addressing two main points: assist in the translation of elderly real consumers’ expectations and demands into more adequate, appealing products and in creating a transition path for companies who wish to incorporate the principles and technologies of production digitalization in their value chain. Furthermore, the article discusses how this proposal could be validated in the real industrial environment

Smart Components within Smart Production Processes and Environments

BRAGECRIM – the Brazilian-German Collaborative Research Initiative in Manufacturing Technology – is one of the largest German-Brazilian collaborative research initiatives. Over 300 researchers from numerous German and Brazilian universities and non-university research organisations have investigated key issues affecting all stages of the production cycle within its framework. Materials science, industrial engineering, metrology and logistics are incorporated into the German-Brazilian research programme. The SCoPE project aims to promote individual physical components to information carriers that contain data about their physical properties, customizations, manufacturing history and purpose. Modern internet technologies enable the interlinking of components as information carriers and the access to information stored in different knowledge repositories, like production data bases and data management systems. These “smart components” will be able to control their manufacturing and assembly procedures applied to them and to autonomously navigate through smart factories equipped with cyber-physical production systems. Potential use cases are the establishment of the traceability of individual components’ manufacturing histories, e. g. for investigations in the case of failures, or the utilization of component data to achieve optimal pairings of components within complex assembly processes

Controlling Smart Production Processes Using RESTful Web Services and Federative Factory Data Management

Today’s production processes use smart devices within production resources and within produced products. Using web technologies they enable world-wide access and exchange of real-time production data on the one hand as well as autonomous and context-adaptive decision making within the production process on the other hand. For the management of such smart production processes the integration of smart devices into existing production data management is required. Gathering, processing and transforming the product data enables new possibilities for planning and controlling smart production processes. In this paper a framework for the integration of smart production data into federative factory data management is specified first. Then two use cases illustrate the application of the approach in practice. A first use case explains benefits for management decision by continuously monitoring the smart production process. The second use case describes possibilities for controlling the smart production process at shop floor level