The main advantage of the PLM solution for a company is that it integrates many enterprise ICT aids in one system and as a result of different processes, can be synchronised. The goal of concurrent engineering can be achieved. Implementing of AmI concepts to support the PLM business paradigm will change the approach. The processes from different chains will be integrated in one virtual environment; the units of this environment will be entities which can be humans, ICT systems (as ERP), intelligent software, or mechatronical agents.
These entities will communicate in a peer-to-peer way and build up product-oriented dy- namic networks. The networks are dynamic, because on different steps of the product life cycle different entities participate in the product-oriented network. The example of such a network is represented in Figure 4. The Figure shows an example of a network on the step of generating an idea about a product. Two types of graphical representation for entities are used; one is a two-dimensional human sign for human entities and another, cycle-with- line-under-it, for the software agent; the communications between entities are shown as lines with arrows. It is clear that, depending on the product or step in the product life cycle, different entities will join or leave the network. The implementation of ambient intelligent concepts and the integration of it into PLM business paradigm will lead to appearance of a new paradigm and a new environment: the ambient intelligent product life-cycle manager (AmI PLM); the main benefits of such an environment will be the following:
• Concentrating information on product and the creation of product-oriented environ- ment for all life-cycle steps
• Enabling information sharing, easier access, and management of product-related data
• Product information updates performed in real-time and in intelligent ways
• Product life-cycle management made easier, and automatically updated
• Enabling products to carry and process information, which influences their destiny
The impact of AmI on service providing and service engineering will be similar to the impact on PLM. The realisation of the AmI vision is required to develop large, complex, heterogeneous, distributed frames. These must be built on multiple-functions platforms capable of providing seamless networking to support the delivery of layers of value-added services or functions to the individual, to industry, and to administrations. The resulting systems, comprising several interacting embedded software components, shall be intelligent, self-configuring, self-healing, self-protective, and self-managed. This leads to a new type of service engineering: ambient intelligence service engineering (AmI SE). As pointed out, SE is a new business opportunity, mainly driven by voluntary agreements along the product life span, and by mandatory rules at dismissal and recovery; these activities, according to the prospected bylaws, request impact monitoring and data vaulting, with third-party certifica- tion, and the AmI SE will be the standard ICT solution. Important benefits, already, exist.
Maintenance tasks tend to be difficult (Arnaiz et al., 2004), requiring experts; maintenance duties characterise by information overload (manuals, forms, real-time data, etc.), collabo- ration with suppliers and operators, and integration of data-sources (draws, components, models, historical data, reparation activities, etc.).
Explanatory.Example/Demonstration.Project
Networked organisations enter today into everyday life, possibly with the mental restric- tion that the individuals (people or company) have the inherent right to accept/forbid the Figure 4. AmI-empowered product-oriented network
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connections. Actually, as is well known, this is only partially true, and, for example, most of the EU countries’ laws permit the generalised recording of the phone links (automatically, for extensions; under special rules, for speech). Likewise, most of us use the car-navigator to find the right destination, or the mobile-phone to be continuously in touch with co-work- ers or friends, forgetting that this means to be fully tracked (with the uncertainty of a few meters); these data results are effective as an anti-terrorism measure, on the condition, of course, that these instruments are actually exploited with no swindling. This way, most of the ideas behind AmI technologies have already entered into current practice, at least when we recognise that they give useful benefits. In our discussion, however, we have been focusing wider scope objectives, strictly related with trends in the manufacture economy, to achieve the growth sustainability. It might be useful, therefore, to consider explanatory cases, showing how AmI ideas already apply into industrial contexts.
One of our test beds was the European Research Project, called FOKSai (2003). The acronym stands for “SME Focussed KM System to support extended product in Ambient Intelligence domain.” The main goal of the project is to develop a knowledge management (KM) system as an extension to Ambient Intelligent products for SMEs in four industrial areas (see Figure 5 and Figure 6). This main goal, common for the four consortium SMEs, is achieved through a sophisticated support to the extended AmI-products of the companies. These SMEs plan to introduce, in the near future (next 1-2 years) new and/or improvements of their current products with even more AmI features, seeing this as their winning competitive edge. A considerable enhancement of business performance of the four SMEs will be reached by introduction of the FOKSai system, mainly by reduction of time and costs for customer support (such as product maintenance, solving customer problems, etc.). For AmI product users, the new support system results in a significant lowering of downtimes of the products and cutting of the maintenance costs. Technically seen, the project will develop:
Figure 5. FOKSai system concept
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• A.methodology.for.extension.of.AmI.products: which will strongly observe business and organisational issues relevant for SMEs
• A.knowledge-based.system.to.support.extended.AmI.products:.which will be af- fordable for the SMEs manufacturers
The FOKSai solution is planned to be general enough, to be applicable for different products and scalable to support future AmI deliveries, in order to achieve a product (methodology and KM system), which can be offered to a wide spectrum of SMEs intending to introduce AmI options in their portfolios. The topics of supply chain support to be developed and demonstrated as pilot installations within the environments of four SMEs in the project consortium include:
• Remote supervising, problem identification, solving, and maintenance of heterogeneous customer systems, and subsequently reduction of efforts/costs for searching for the reasons of problems in products containing AmI components
• E-supporting manufacturer’s staff at remote customer site locations to solve customer/
product problems
• Proper integration and sophisticated knowledge-based interpretation of the intelligent ambience information and "reactions"
• Gathering and structuring of the AmI product and process knowledge, from the problem solutions, for the reuse in innovations introduction
• Direct feedback from user to AmI-product/service design and development
Based on the system concept, the business cases have been identified and the user require- ments have been specified, by detailing of modules and relations among partners and to the legacy systems. These industrial applications are from four different SMEs, with different profiles from four European countries (Germany, Great Britain, Spain, and Hungary). The dissimilarity ensures that the results of the project can be widely used later. A short descrip- tion of the business cases helps in showing the expected issues.
The objective of the first business case (RD, Germany) is to establish a new form of customer support by implementing a new methodology and ICT system to support the already-intro- duced extension in the form of a remote maintenance system, which is the step further in the customer support. The innovation includes not only system status and ambient-related data, but also performance indices, obviously, necessary to achieve full delivery availability and advanced maintainability. The knowledge-based remote access maintenance system provides very fast reaction to customer problems. Especially for real-time critical business or process disturbances, requiring immediate corrective actions, the efficient action, via such a remote access module, is of major importance to reach customer satisfaction and to increase his trust.
In the second business case (LX, Hungary), the need of very high data security, assuring users’ trust, is obvious in such a system. Due to the number of measurements and informa- tion from the intelligent ambient network, which are analysed continuously as well as their
mutual dependencies, it is clear that a rather complex KM system is necessary for proper remote product maintenance. The application of the knowledge-based and Web-based FOKSai system needs to provide the quick reactions to any disturbance, taking into ac- count the relevance of the information processed. Extensions to the products, connected to the monitoring and control frame, have to be scalable, to offer high varieties of services.
A proactive customer support has to be addressed, offering to the operator online help and consultancy function. The proactive setting also enables feedback collection from custom- ers, to continuously improve services.
The third business case (DT, Spain) focuses on several activities, which can be summarised as control engineering, technical process automation, remote-management studies, and technical projects. The activity expands around the remote management for technical installations, which allows monitoring, management, and actuation (when required). Furthermore, it can also be applied to different processes, such as chemistry, metallurgy, textile industry, potable and residual waters, control of refrigerator chambers, electrical mini-centrals, and so on.
The SME in the fourth business case (CT, UK) produces process automation and cutting machinery and supplies other companies with turn-key solutions. Installation and setup, backed by problem-solving support provided online (mainly per telephone) either to their own field engineers or to customer maintenance staff, are among the qualifying activities of CT. Thus, CT is often requested to send engineers to solve problems at the customer’s site.
This 24-hours support involves rather high costs. The firm needs to support their deliveries in more efficient and cost-effective way, that is, it needs to provide problem-solving help to customers (and field engineers), with process full knowledge, but without front-end op- erators. The complex CT delivery requires a number of built-in measurements and control of machines performance. Recourse to knowledge-based analysis of ambient data enables adjustments to be made when they are required.
Technicalities.of.the.Information.Frame
The four business cases cover quite common situations, still, showing even the SMEs are compelled to address externalities, as compared to the traditional productivity upgrading which focus on internalities. A few technical details of the prototypal development help in explaining how to exploit existing tools. As previously described, the FOKSai system divides into several modules (see Figure 6). The prototype system comprises these modules with a restricted number of realised functionalities, as seen from the modules description, which shortly addresses: the common knowledge-base (CKB); the setup module (SM); the AmI information processing module (AmI IPM); the diagnostic engine (DE); the product support module (PSM); and the knowledge analysis module (KAM).
The common knowledge base (CKB) has the objective of storing all the information that describes products and processes, as well as all the necessary data related to these com- ponents. This repository was implemented at the end users as a relational database, using Oracle or MySQL, depending on their individual requests. Further completion of the data in CKB will be done during the full system prototype development, but no refinements and changes are planned in the CKB structure.
The setup module (SM) is an efficient graphical user interface that enables the users to understand the database model and make the best use of it. This module, at early prototype level, is realized as a stand-alone Java application installed at the companies. It supports the definition, modification, and deletion of all data which constitutes the common knowledge base archival. In addition, this Java application will include, at the full prototype stage, the corresponding functionality to administrate the users of the FOKSai system, including users and user groups’ definition, and specification of rights for each user, regarding what could be accessed, modified, and/or deleted in the system.
In the early prototype, the main function of the AmI information processing module (AmI IPM) is to map the input XML data (coming from the AmI products) to the common knowl- edge base (CKB). AmI IPM does not presently have a graphical user interface (GUI), just a command line input, where the input file name is given, and a text-based output, to where it writes certain messages to let the user or tester know what is going on during the operation of the module. This module has been developed using the 1.4 version of J2EE SDK. For the easier development, the Eclipse Project software suite was used as a GUI to help the work. For the parsing of XML files, the SAX XML parser was integrated into this module.
The early prototype of the AmI IPM, as a standalone Java application, was tested with the simulated data of the business cases. The input data is written into XML files, according to the defined structure in a schema file.
The diagnostic engine (DE) provides interactive problem-solving aid to users, with recourse to a structured method of case-based reasoning (CBR) to get the required problem-solving information. The module has been implemented in C++, using the function library of the ReCall tool, and connected to the FOKSai system through a CORBA interface. The user utilises the functionality of the DE, and accesses its results through the product support
Figure 6. FOKSai modules
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module. The testing of this module was done through the assessment of the product support module, and its functionalities are fully hidden from the system user.
The product support module (PSM) is the central point of interaction between the user and the FOKSai system, that is, it contains the graphical user interface. This module further includes information, documents, and knowledge relevant for product and customer support (e.g., information on new product models, new services, advice on how to apply products and services in order to avoid problems, etc.). The early prototype of the product support module is implemented in Enterprise Java Beans (J2EE 1.4) and available through a Java graphical user interface only.
The knowledge analysis module (KAM) is charged with three main functionalities:
• Statistical.analysis: FOKSai users can create Pareto charts of most common problems by type and severity using the utility; the users can list all those charted problems using a special utility; this tool is intended to be used for problem identification.
• Database.query.tool: It allows FOKSai users to perform flexible database queries by simply selecting the predefined items available; FOKSai administrator can create and store SQL queries in order to allow other users to use them; the administrator can easily create specific queries for CKB maintenance, according to the necessities.
• Knowledge.analysis: FOKSai users can use a forum in order to provide statistical analysis reports and send feedback to design staff, create and upload maintenance reports, receive online technical support, and obtain quick fixes for current problems or to get information about new developments on products.
The knowledge analysis module has been developed following the Sun J2EE 1.4 standard.
It combines servlets, JSP, and EJB, and has been tested in JBoss 4.0.2 Java Application Server. The module is connected to the PSM and the CKB and is accessible using a Web browser. Basically, this module allows the users to perform statistical analyses of the prob- lems stored in the CKB; lists the problems which have been selected; shows any table of the CKB for maintenance purposes; and provides feedback to FOKSai users via a Forum tool. The KAM module uses SSL and form-based authentication, which allows the users to search among all forum elements.
The FOKSai project, promoted within quite conventional SMEs, shows that the existing ICT tools allow high interactivity levels, authorising knowledge-driven reconfiguring of earlier businesses, to be now focussed on the externalities of the supply chain. In the upgrading, out of the politico-legal and socio-economic rules discussed in the previous sections, the technical background represents the necessary enabling prerequisite. To that purpose, the ambient intelligence deserves special mention, at different levels of sophistication, and the reference to actual issues is a good signal, when addressing real problems to solve, rather than abstractly looking for clever solutions (out of underlying demands).
Conclusion
The chapter gives a bird’s-eye view on the emerging options offered by distributed intel- ligence tools, to foster competitiveness in the supply chains of industrialised countries. The ICT tools are recognised as the driving aid, basically, on their ability of providing informa- tion-intensive tools, in parallel to the traditional trading of manufactured goods. This has falls-off on the value buildup, enhancing direct intangible provisions, and opening indirect opportunities with product and service deliveries, on the condition that suitable ICT aids are joined. The new business paradigms are grounded on the availability of the full transparency over the product life cycle, with profit for the manufacturers (according to the economy of scope rules), for the users (for reliable conformance-to-specification management), and for the third parties (for better eco-consistency compliance). The prospected analysis moves from the connections that link product life-cycle management (PLM) and service engineer- ing (SE) to show how these are the information prerequisites to aim at condition monitoring maintenance (CMM) setups, built as knowledge-based systems (KBS) to provide the ambient intelligence (AmI), consistent with the new business paradigms.
The discussion specifically addresses the domain of the ICT cooperative infrastructures, supporting products and services by networked organisations, such as clusters of enterprises that collaborate for given delivery, with benefit of the customers having a unified responsi- bility over the lifelong exploitation of the purchased goods. This certainly does not means that the manufacturer will remain in charge of the whole activity (even if this seems to be prospected by the EU rules, on the suppliers’ responsibilities), rather than outsourcing could establish, on the condition that appropriate PLM/SE tools are provided together with every extended artefact, to make operative the supporting extended enterprises.
The scenario, quite challenging by itself, faces completely new driving demands when considered in the framework of the environmental policy already enacted by the European Council. The situation, it should be said, is a bit puzzling. In the chapter, we have recalled the broad domains, where voluntary agreements between the actors of the common market can be exploited to improve a value chain; we have also outlined the demanding compulsory targets enacted to deal with resource recovery and eco-impact control. These are not fanciful problems, and manufacturers without a winning solution shall be expelled from the market.
Now, the basic business paradigms upgrading rules can suitably be stated; the economic instruments that modify the existing market are enacted; the technical prerequisites can be derived with reliable trust. Still, suitably diffused knowledge on these requests seems to be (at least in some areas) far below the necessities, as if the EU regulations could still be ignored or bypassed. We have recognised in the networked organisation ideas the most powerful means to enable the business paradigms of the new knowledge-driven entrepreneurship, with efficient exploitation of the EU-enacted economic instruments, due to the technical prerequisites of, for instance, the ambient intelligence aids. On these facts, this chapter deals with solutions to come, but strictly linked with urgent (and well-posed) problems.
Industrial systems in the future will typically incorporate integrated design and flexible manufacturing for user-oriented extended artefacts and should expand over virtual organi- sations, with intelligence (mostly in the form of decision support systems [DSS]) covering the life cycle of products and services, using different AI tools, with a certified visibility of environmental impact. The trends show that the main issues are eco-consistent extended-