This ESPRC project brings together a cluster of academic and industrial practitioners in information science and manufacturing to research and develop an on-demand, intelligent product lifecycle service system for increased yield for products and processes that can bridge the information gaps associated with inefficient supply chain integration and the lack of knowledge on product usage throughout design, development and operational lifecycles. The outcomes of this project will have application across a diverse range of industrial sectors, for both those consortium members already identified (aerospace, automotive, defence, R3 (i.e. reuse, recycle and remanufacture)) and other manufacturing and service companies alike.
The challenge of this project is to develop an on-demand intelligent product lifecycle service system for increased yield (Table 1) for products and processes that can bridge the information gaps associated with inefficient supply chain integration and a lack of knowledge on product usage throughout lifecycles. Current commercial solutions are limited to “on-site” silos of information that are restricting UK manufacturing in terms of its ability to: (i) optimise efficiency in materials, resource, energy utilisation, (ii) speed up innovation, (iii) improve the generation and exploitation of manufacturing intelligence, (iv) support supply chain collaboration throughout the product and process lifecycles and (v) enable new business models and technologies to be readily adopted (e.g. product service systems (PSS) supporting either product operation, usage or results oriented business models).
Key research challenges cover: (i) Service Foundations (e.g., dynamically reconfigurable architectures, data and process integration and sematic enhanced service discovery); (ii) Service Composition (e.g. composability analyses, dynamic and adaptive processes, quality of service compositions, business driven compositions); (iii) Service Management and Monitoring (e.g. self: -configuring, -adapting, -healing, -optimising and -protecting) and (iv) Service Design and Development (e.g. engineering of business services, versioning and adaptivity, governance across supply chains).