Knowledge mapping concerning applications of nanocomposite hydrogels for drug delivery: A bibliometric and visualized study (2003–2022)

Background: Nanocomposite Hydrogels (NHs) are 3D molecular networks formed by physically or covalently crosslinking polymer with nanoparticles or nanostructures, which are particularly suitable for serving as carriers for drug delivery systems. Many articles pertaining to the applications of Nanocomposite Hydrogels for drug delivery have been published, however, the use of bibliometric and visualized analysis in this area remains unstudied. The purpose of this bibliometric study intended to comprehensively analyze the knowledge domain, research hotspots and frontiers associated with the applications of Nanocomposite Hydrogels for drug delivery.Methods: We identified and retrieved the publications concerning the applications of NHs for drug delivery between 2003 and 2022 from Web of Science Core Collection Bibliometric and visualized analysis was utilized in this investigative study.Results: 631 articles meeting the inclusion criteria were identified and retrieved from WoSCC. Among those, 2,233 authors worldwide contributed in the studies, accompanied by an average annual article increase of 24.67%. The articles were co-authored by 764 institutions from 52 countries/regions, and China published the most, followed by Iran and the United States. Five institutions published more than 40 papers, namely Univ Tabriz (n = 79), Tabriz Univ Med Sci (n = 70), Islamic Azad Univ (n = 49), Payame Noor Univ (n = 42) and Texas A&M Univ (n = 41). The articles were published in 198 journals, among which the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (n = 53) published the most articles, followed by Carbohydrate Polymers (n = 24) and ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces (n = 22). The top three journals most locally cited were Carbohydrate Polymers, Biomaterials and Advanced materials. The most productive author was Namazi H (29 articles), followed by Bardajee G (15 articles) and Zhang J (11 articles) and the researchers who worked closely with other ones usually published more papers. “Doxorubicin,” “antibacterial” and “responsive hydrogels” represent the current research hotspots in this field and “cancer therapy” was a rising research topic in recent years. “(cancer) therapeutics” and “bioadhesive” represent the current research frontiers.Conclusion: This bibliometric and visualized analysis offered an investigative study and comprehensive understanding of publications regarding the applications of Nanocomposite Hydrogels for drug delivery from 2003 to 2022. The outcome of this study would provide insights for researchers in the field of Nanocomposite Hydrogels applications for drug delivery

A graph-based methodology for context-aware smart product-service system concept development

With the trend of sertivization and digitalization, manufacturing companies are upgrading their business paradigms as Smart product-service systems (Smart PSS) by offering customized and integrated product-service bundles (PSBs) via digital technologies (e.g., smart-connected products (SCPs)) and informatics-based approaches (e.g., big data analytic tools and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies). Smart PSS, especially Smart PSS concept development, distinguishes from conventional ones in the following aspects. First, major studies discussed Smart PSS development without considering the closed-loop and ever-evolving characteristics. Second, massive unstructured user-generated data embrace abundant latent user knowledge, and hence, can assist user-centric design in Smart PSS. Third, the end-users expect unique rather than generalized functionalities, which is highly dependent on the usage scenarios. Last, facing at fierce market, Smart PSS service providers are expected to comprehensively evaluate their product-service bundles even after launching to the market. Motivated by the above issues, this study explores a framework for engineers to make proper decisions while upgrading the product-service bundles. Furthermore, this study investigates the approaches to effectively extracting implicit requirements and generating solutions for Smart PSS development. The scientific contributions are briefly summarized as follows. First, considering the multipartite information in Smart PSS, a systematic framework is built for Smart PSS concept development to organize the information and the decision-making tasks. Two critical Smart PSS design tasks, i.e., requirement elicitation and solution selection, are modelled as multipartite graphs (also referred to complex networks), which are analogous to the multipartite information in the real world. The overall Smart PSS design framework transforms conventional human-intensive design methods into a data-driven design method (Chapter 3). Second, this study provides a new approach to explore implicit requirements considering usage scenarios. The proposed approach enriches the constructed requirement graph by exploring semantic relations. The extracted results can serve as references for engineers to understand the implicit relations between the contexts, product components, and service modules (Chapter 4). Third, an unbiased hypergraph-based approach is proposed to deal with the mismatched solutions caused by the uncertain technical attributes during the Smart PSS configuration process. The proposed approach allows users to offer their preferred usage scenarios as auxiliary information, hence relieving the uncertain technical attributes’ effects (Chapter 5). Finally, a context-aware concept evaluation approach is proposed to comprehensively evaluate the product-service bundles from the perspectives of user behavior and user perception based on information axiom and natural language processing (NLP) techniques (Chapter 6). The research contributions were validated via an example of a three-dimensional (3D) printer company that offers remote 3D printing service bundles. It is a typical result-oriented PSS since the users pay for the 3D printers’ functions but do not own one. The example’s smartness is reflected in the processes of implicit requirement elicitation, personalized concept selection, and automatic concept evaluation. Despite the concrete case study of 3D printing services, the proposed systematic Smart PSS conceptual design framework and corresponding design approaches can also be transformed onto other Smart PSS projects when the project has multi-sourced data, heterogeneous entities, and complex relations among entities. Most of the research work in this thesis has been reported in three journal papers and two conference papers. It is hoped that the research outcomes could offer useful design guidance for the product designers/industrial companies for digital servitization upgrades in a user-centric way.Doctor of Philosoph

Industrial smart product-service systems solution design via hybrid concerns

Enabled by the third and fourth waves of Information Technology (IT) innovation, together with the sustainable concerns towards a circular economy, manufacturing industries are shifting rapidly towards a service-oriented paradigm in the smart, connected environment, i.e. smart product-service systems (Smart PSS). Owing to its unique characteristics, it reshapes the solution design (product-service design) with several hybrid concerns. This research, as an explorative study, underlines three general ones at the macro-level, i.e. design and redesign as an overall value generation process (hybrid design), human and machine intelligence integration (hybrid intelligence), and technical and business innovation (hybrid value). Accordingly, novel design methods, intelligent systems, and value co-creation models are envisioned at the micro-level to assure industrial Smart PSS solution design success. To make our visions concrete, two prospective application scenarios leveraging abovementioned hybrid concerns are given at last. It is hoped this work can contribute to the future directions of this interdisciplinary research area, and offer insightful guidance to industrial companies in their solution design process with profitable outcomes.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio

Smart product-service systems : a novel transdisciplinary sociotechnical paradigm

The third-wave of IT competition have embraced a promising market of low cost, high performance smart, connected products (SCP). Owing to their unique capabilities, SCPs together with their generated smart services, as a solution bundle can fulfil the everchanging individual user’s needs. Meanwhile, manufacturers/service providers leverage massive user generated data and product sensed data via the Internet-of-Things (IoT) for evergreen design innovation. This emerging IT-driven transdisciplinary engineering paradigm is named Smart Product-Service Systems (Smart PSS), which is an ecosystem consisting of various stakeholders as the key players for open innovation (social aspect), intelligent systems as the infrastructure to enable smartness and connectedness (technical aspect), and digital servitization as the value proposition to make higher profits (business aspect). Though similar terminologies have been utilized to describe such paradigm, none of them emphasizes its transdisciplinary essence, as a sociotechnical system. Moreover, scarcely any work addresses its lifecycle perspectives for sustainability concerns. Aiming to fill these gaps, this research provides a fundamental basis of Smart PSS by summarizing typical works from technical, social, and business aspects, respectively. Furthermore, its lifecycle perspectives in a circular economy is depited to motivate more in-depth research in the near future.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio

A graph-based requirement elicitation approach in the context of smart product-service systems

The trend of servitization has promoted the prosperity of product-service systems (PSS), by generating integrated solution bundles with more values for both industrial companies and customers. Nowadays, with the advances of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, an emerging paradigm known as smart productservice systems (Smart PSS) has been proposed and discussed. Smart PSS is an IT driven value co-creation business strategy, consisting of smart, connected products (SCP) as tools and medium, stakeholders as participants, and intelligent systems as the supporting tools. Owing to the unique characteristics of Smart PSS, huge-volume, high velocity and heterogeneous data can be collected and analyzed to extract useful knowledge with wisdom. This is especially important in the requirement elicitation process. Though many existing studies have discussed methods to support requirement elicitation process, few studies emphasize how the data and information play their roles with products and services in the context of Smart PSS. Aiming to address it, a graph-based requirement elicitation approach considering system-in-use information in the context of Smart PSS is proposed. It leverages the graph embedding technique, i.e. deepwalk, together with the pre-defined product/service/condition ontologies to depict their in-context relations, and hence discover prospective latent needs. Finally, a case study of smart bike design requirement elicitation is illustrated at last to demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness.National Research Foundation (NRF)Published versionThe authors wish to acknowledge the financial support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore and Delta Electronics International (Singapore) Pte Ltd., under the Corporate Laboratory@ University Scheme (Ref. SCO-RP1; RCA-16/434) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

A survey of requirements management in smart product-service systems

Driven by the advances of information and communication technologies (ICT) as well as the increasing complexity of product and service bundles in business market, smart product-service system (Smart PSS) has become a key factor for industrial companies to meet demanding customer expectations of individual product and services. Requirement management, as the first step of Smart PSS development, significantly affects its final success. In Smart PSS, requirement management is endowed with new capabilities and opportunities due to the mature of the advances of techniques and smart devices. The manner of requirement management has transformed from a human-intensive manner to a data-driven manner. Facing this challenge, scarcely any paper discussed the foundations of managing requirements in the context of Smart PSS. In this paper, the prerequisites of managing requirements in Smart PSS are discussed, data properties, representation format and reasoning methods are analyzed based on a data-driven requirement management architecture. Two potential scenarios of requirement management are discussed as well. This work depicts the deserving manner of requirement management in Smart PSS, which points out key points of managing requirements from heterogeneous usage data in the new Smart PSS paradigm.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio

Knowledge representation and reasoning methods in the concept development of product design : a state-of-the-art review

Concept development is a knowledge-intensive activity and plays a critical role in product design since it significantly affects the success of a product in the market but with a considerable low cost. Because of rapid change of product information and customer preferences, large-scale knowledge among Internet and requirement of machine-readable data, abundant well-represented knowledge is required to support the design tasks in concept development. Though many related works knowledge representation and reasoning have been studied, there still lacks a holistic review of the knowledge representation and reasoning methods which are appropriate for the concept development of product design. In this paper, the knowledge involved in the concept development of product design, knowledge representation methods and knowledge reasoning methods which are suitable to apply in this phase are discussed respectively. 38 related publications out of over a hundred reviewed ones are selected in this paper. This literature review lays the foundation for future research in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning in the concept development of product design.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio

An integrated computer-aided design environment for customizing product/service systems

Manufacturers begin to give more and more customizing offerings and services of their products in order to create the values that really fits customers’ needs and wants rather than to supply materialized products directly. Systematic design approaches and modularized computer-aided design systems are the key to reduce the design complexity and would lead to successfully converge divergent thinking and creativity to the specifically defined problems. Therefore, this research aims to propose a creative design system framework with an integrated method of customizing product/ service systems (PSSs) for the solution modularization. A systematic design model consists of three phases:1) identify problems and initial design (IPID); 2) design trimming and resolution generation (DTRG); 3) interaction mapping and design evaluation (IMDE). In phase I, we can understand customer requirements through interviewing by knowledge elicitation methods and root cause analysis. In phase II, we can generate more possible service components related to a specific product characteristic by innovative principles of the theory of inventive problem-solving. In phase III, we can assign the interactions between service components and customer needs to create PSS solution modules. A computer-aided design system environment, called SCO Explorer, is developed based on the above design phases and theoretic concepts to represent a solution design environment with the design requirements and to determine the input parameters of each phase. As the result shows that we verified the usefulness of the design method and tool by applying to existing PSSs by an electronic manufacturer to carry out a PSS solution.National Research Foundation (NRF)Published versionThis work was supported within the Delta-NTU Corporate Lab for Cyber-Physical Systems with funding support from Delta Electronics Inc and the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under the Corp Lab@ University Scheme (Ref. SCO-RP1; RCA-16/434) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Smart Product-Service Systems Solution Design via Hybrid Crowd Sensing Approach

The third wave of information technology (IT) competition has enabled one promising value co-creation proposition, Smart PSS (smart product-service systems). Manufacturing companies offer smart, connected products with various e-services as a solution bundle to meet individual customer satisfaction, and in return, collect and analyze usage data for evergreen design purposes in a circular manner. Despite a few works discussing such value co-creation business mechanism, scarcely any has been reported from technical aspect to realizing this data-driven manufacturer/service provider-customer interaction cost-effectively. To fill this gap, a novel hybrid crowd sensing approach is proposed, and adopted in the Smart PSS context. It leverages large-scale mobile devices and their massive user-generated/product-sensed data, and converges with reliable static sensing nodes and other data sources in the smart, connected environment for value generation. Both the proposed hybrid crowd sensing conceptual framework and its systematic information modeling process are introduced. An illustrative example of smart water dispenser maintenance service design is given to validate its feasibility. The result shows that the proposed approach can be a promising manner to enable value co-creation process cost-effectively.Funding Agencies|National Research Foundation (NRF), SingaporeSingapore National Research Foundation; Delta Electronics International (Singapore) Pte., Ltd., through the Corporate Laboratory@ University Scheme, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore [RCA-16/434]</p

A knowledge graph-aided concept–knowledge approach for evolutionary smart product–service system development

In order to meet user expectations and to optimize user experience with a higher degree of flexibility and sustainability, the Smart product–service system (Smart PSS), as a novel value proposition paradigm considering both online and offline smartness, was proposed. However, conventional manners for developing PSS require many professional consultations and still cannot meet with the new features of Smart PSS, such as user context-awareness and ever-evolving knowledge management. Therefore, aiming to assist Smart PSS development cost-effectively, this paper adopted the knowledge graph (KG) technique and concept–knowledge (C-K) model to propose an evolutionary design approach. Two knowledge graphs are firstly established with open-source knowledge, prototype specifications, and user-generated textual data. Then, triggered by personalized requirements, four KG-aided C-K operators are conducted based on graph-based query patterns and computational linguistics algorithms, thus generating innovative solutions for evolving Smart PSS. To validate the performance of the proposed approach, a case study of a smart nursing bed fulfilling multiple personalized requirements is conducted, and the evaluation result of its knowledge evolution is acceptable. It hopes that this work can offer insightful guidance to industrial organizations in their development of Smart PSS.National Research Foundation (NRF)This work is conducted within the Delta-NTU Corporate Lab for Cyber-Physical Systems with funding support from Delta Electronics Inc and the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under the Corporate Laboratory @ University Scheme (Ref. RCA-16/434; SCO-RP1) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71671113). The authors are also grateful for the contributions from members of the nursing bed project at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the medical suggestions from physicians in Huashan Hospital, Shanghai