A review of the intelligent product across the product lifecycle

Abstract

The notion of the intelligent product and its implications over the product lifecycle has gathered much interest over the years with increasing numbers of research projects. In this paper we revisit the intelligent product and review research that followed the intelligent product blueprint. We found that most research focused on specific parts of the lifecycle and most developments provided autonomy to the product in terms of environment sensing and guidance in decision making, halting autonomy at the actuation of decisions and operations. The decision making requirement proved to be the most challenging with two distinct paradigms being followed: centralised decision support systems and distributed multi-agent systems. Future directions we contemplate include the development of intelligent products that can embrace the whole lifecycle and autonomous decision making through the product's agent based software representation.