Intelligent, smart products, and processes
Résumé
The concept of the intelligent products (IPs) and knowledge-based concepts such as “smart products,” “smart processes,” or “product and process-driven controls” are of increasing importance. These concepts exploit the features in a product with a decision-making process giving birth to so-called IPs. During the generation of such IPs, the whole product’s life cycle processes, from its design to its recycling including its manufacturing, use, and maintenance ought to be considered. In our changing world economic environment, this concept has an important potential impact on criteria such as cost, efficiency reactivity, and sustainability. This notion of intelligent or smart product can be extended toward building the concepts for intelligent processes. Examples of such processes include intelligent design, intelligent manufacturing, smart maintenance, built-in quality, tractability, and many similar processes. IPs and intelligent processes require that we reconsider the organization’s control, knowledge, service, and management of its systems as a set of integrated and well-connected framework. IPs generally aims at dropping the barriers faced by today’s systems in terms of reactivity, adaptability, energy, sustainability, and so on. Today, industrialists and researchers face a number of new challenges: such as how to study, specify, and develop new models, methods, and tools in order to develop and build such an integrated set of well-connected framework for each IP.