8.07 Digital thread for smart product in service-oriented supply chains

Design of new products is getting more and more driven by customers’ requirements. New products must be designed and realized with sustainable materials, produced over low energy production lines and possibly equipped with sensors and printed electronics to monitor their use by customers, to collect data about the product status over its entire lifecycle, for analyzing them and extracting useful insights and feedbacks for further design and manufacturing improvement. We refer to this kind of products as smart products.

This project is focused on the application of ICT technologies for the concrete realization of a smart product through:

• methods, techniques and tools for the sensorization of products (also with additive printing technologies) in a sustainable way (in terms of energy harvesting solutions and production costs);
• an holistic digital representation of the products in the cyber-space over its entire lifecycle, modelling and managing data collected during the design, production and logistics in an integrated way instead of independent and separated silos (Digital Thread);
• a catalogue of data-driven and AI-driven services for the collection, monitoring, visualization of data about the product, information exchange across the supply chain actors, with specific attention on security, data protection and data ownership issues (data sovereignty); services/industrial APIs will be modelled both as atomic software components and as composite services, to implement domain-oriented (i.e., driven by domain knowledge) and demand-oriented (i.e., driven by new customers’ requirements) applications.

The aim of the project is to provide a proof-of-concept framework, i.e., a set of methodological steps and a dedicated platform to guide the application of Digital Thread principles to different use cases that are interesting for the MICS context:

• sustainable sensorization (also with additive printing technologies) of new mass products in the fashion and appliance domains and collection of data about their usage by customers for the identification of user’s experience issues, that can help to backward improve the design and production of the product itself; let’s consider for example a chair regulation mechanism, that if properly sensorised can be used to collect data feedbacks about how customers use the product and provide different configurations given the characteristics of the user (e.g., habits, type of activity) for the improvement of product usability, their design and production;
• the collection, management and analysis of data from complex industrial components produced by an Original Equipment Manufacturer (e.g., a smart spindle) over the entire component lifecycle, not only to discover anomalies for predictive maintenance purposes, but also to verify process performances and propose new advanced services to customers (servitization);
• the integration of available data collected over the product lifecycle and still managed into distinct data silos, and the design of a service-oriented architecture on top of them, for the improvement of production and logistics processes and flexible production, through (on-the-fly) reconfiguration of the production line given changes in the product requirements, operating on the digital twin of the production line and logistics.

The project will enable a methodological approach to the design of smart products, bringing to production chains resilient and sustainable, where the term “resilience” not only refers to the capability of balancing anomalies occurring over the production line, but also the ability of promptly and flexibly react to new emerging customers’ requirements.