Environment interaction model-driven smart products through-life design framework

ABSTRACT

With the advent of Industry 4.0, design of a smart product to work in a smart factory, or at home or city over its lifecycle has to consider its intelligent interaction with its external environment (physical, human and cyberspace environments). Thus, environment interaction-driven design of smart products becomes an important design research field, facing a huge challenge of integrating a smart product and its environment interaction design crossing all its life phases. In this paper, a high-profile design framework is proposed for guiding environment interaction model-driven smart products through-life design. It has three core elements: (1) a generic environment interaction model of a smart product through-life phases, which can help map out the interaction requirements between the smart product and other interaction elements through-life phases, (2) a smart product design process model for guiding product and its interaction design at each phase and (3) a design strategy of smart products through-life design. Its implementation feasibility is demonstrated with an industrial case study, showing that it is helpful to implement design solutions to a smart product for satisfying intelligent interactions with its external environments through-life phases.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart products
• environment interaction
• product modelling
• life cycle design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2017YFB1201102.