Jan Nyman

Sustainable PLM through Intelligent Products

The basis for Sustainable PLM is enabling Intelligent Products to communicate between themselves and with other systems in order to reduce CO2 emissions, energy usage, and environmental damage. This type of communication between Intelligent Products and other information systems with the objective of reducing environmental impacts is an example of closed-loop product lifecycle management. The objective of the paper is to outline an architectural information system model for implementing Sustainable PLM based on experiences from a number of real-life applications. The technological challenge for developing Sustainable PLM is the high number and variety of information systems that need to communicate over organizational limits and over time. In the paper we describe how Sustainable PLM has been implemented using Intelligent Products in a number of representative real-life applications.

Smart Spaces for Ubiquitously Smart Buildings

Building automation is a domain where interoperability between equipment made by different manufacturers is rare. In addition to competing standards, completely proprietary solutions are also common. This is a great challenge for implementing ‘ubiquitously smart buildings’, where building automation systems, user interfaces and services can interact seamlessly. The paper describes how a Semantic Information Broker (SIB) can be used as an enabler of interoperability, where an ecosystem of supplementary services is created through manufacturer-agnostic agents.

From tracking with RFID to intelligent products

The Internet of Things notion is sometimes being employed to signify the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) for tracking and tracing of products in supply chains. However, RFID is only one auto-ID technology among others. The world is already full of products with embedded identification, processing power, sensors etc. that can do much more than ordinary RFID tags. When such products will have the means to communicate between themselves and with other systems we will eventually reach a limit where they could be called intelligent products. Intelligent products are capable of collecting information and reacting on it proactively, e.g. estimating needs for maintenance or repair. With increased computing power and communication capabilities, products may also become pro-active.

Instance-Informed Information Systems: A Pre-requisite for Energy-Efficient and Green Information Systems

In order to create energy-efficient, ubiquitous and green information systems, it will be necessary to exchange information and co-ordinate action between systems that have traditionally not been interoperable. Providing such interoperability is a major challenge unless the underlying information systems are implemented in a way that allows for the collection of relevant information, such as (near) real-time sensor readings and higher-level events, as well as and the ability to take proper actions based on that information. The paper shows how and why instance-informed information systems are a requirement for implementing energy-efficient and green information systems, as well as showing how such information systems have been implemented in several real-world applications.