SmartProducts - Proactive Knowledge for Smart Products

SmartProducts is an Integrated Project funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme conducted by ten partners from industry and academia. The project will last three years and it started in February 2009.

SmartProducts develops the scientific and technological basis for building "smart products" with embedded "proactive knowledge". Smart products help customers, designers and workers to deal with the ever increasing complexity and variety of modern products. Smart products leverage "proactive knowledge" to communicate and co-operate with humans, other products and the environment. Proactive knowledge encompasses knowledge about the product itself (features, functions, dependencies, usage, etc.), its environment (physical context, other smart products) and its users (preferences, abilities, intentions, etc.). In addition, proactive knowledge comprises executable workflows and knowledge about interaction, enabling the smart product to proactively engage in multimodal dialogues with the user. Thereby, smart products "talk", "guide", and "assist" designers, workers and consumers dealing with them. Some proactive knowledge will be co-constructed with the product, while other parts are gathered during the product lifecycle using embedded sensing and communication capabilities. The outcome of SmartProducts will impact the manufacturing and consumer domain, primarily targeting consumer goods, automotive and aerospace industries, spanning both product innovation (for consumer goods and automotive) and process innovations (for automotive and aerospace).

In the SmartProducts project, we will

• develop a platform for developing smart products that use proactive knowledge (see Development)
• develop tools that facilitate the acquisition and maintenance of proactive knowledge (see Development)
• provide an analysis of the business value of smart products
• showcase the applicability of the developed platform and tools in three application scenarios: Smart Kitchen (Philips Research), Smart Car (Centro Ricerche FIAT) and Aircraft Manufacturing (EADS Innovation Works)

Vision

If we take a close look at today’s technical products, starting from small consumer goods such as cell phones all the way up to cars and airplanes, it is possible to clearly identify certain trends:

• Increased complexity of technical products
• Emerging diversity within product lines
• Selling of complete service solutions instead of physical goods
• Need for interoperability in open environments
• Growing amount and diversity of product-related data, information and content

Smart products are envisioned to be the next generation of products addressing these trends. Smart products collect and use proactive knowledge to engage in complex interactions with other products, their environment and their users. The goal of the SmartProducts project is to provide an industry-applicable lifecylce-spanning methodology with tool and platforms to support the construction of smart products. We will demonstrate the applicability of our platform with three industrial scenarios: manufacturing airplanes, supporting the whole life-cycle of a car, and enhancing the end-user experience.

For example, a smart cooking-book or cooking guide instructs a user in the kitchen on the ingredients, utensils and appliances he will need to prepare a dish. It then guides him on each step of the recipe, showing him what to do with supporting audio and video clips. It is also able to “light up” the equipment to use (e.g. the blender, pot, pan, etc.) exactly when it is needed in the recipe, since the cooking guide is able to track the user’s progress. It communicates with other smart products in the kitchen, e.g. a “smart” cooking spoon. The spoon is able to detect the temperature and pH of the food it is immersed in and feeds this back to the cooking guide: “Be careful not to overheat it... it might burn and stick to the bottom! It might be useful to add a splash of water since that will help lubricate the bottom ... and a dash of cream to take the sharpness off the tomato flavours!”

Research Activities

The SmartProducts project aims at researching all aspects relevant to the acquisition, modelling, reasoning, management, and use of proactive knowledge for smart products. This comprises the technological basis for embedding proactive knowledge into smart products and using it to communicate and co-operate with humans, other products and the environment. Laying the foundations for smart products based on proactive knowledge requires substantial scientific research in a number of scientific fields some of which have been partly unrelated up to now. Hence, the challenge is to achieve scientific advances in well-established scientific fields while ensuring a clear direction towards the required scientific basis for dealing with proactive knowledge and smart products. This requires an interdisciplinary and more holistic approach than the one used in previous research efforts. In particular SmartProducts will contribute to the following fields of research:

• Product-centred Knowledge Management: SmartProducts will bring the concept of ontology-based knowledge management further, from supporting distributed communities to supporting the product lifecycle, from design to final use, from designer communities to user groups. Each group will be supported with specific tailored tools, all of them will be able to share and reuse knowledge relevant to the product lifecycle, independently from where, when and by whom it was created.
• Knowledge Modelling and Reasoning: No approaches have considered augmenting this passive knowledge with active knowledge components, i.e., models of tasks and workflows. These are essential to ensure the pro-active nature of smart products. Therefore, two core goals of this project are to provide a) a comprehensive modeling framework by b) augmenting passive context knowledge with the declarative description of active knowledge.
• Smart Items and Environments: Smart Items and Environments research usually focuses on singular application domains (Smart Home, Smart Offices or small number of specific devices) and mostly on end consumers of information workers the focus of the SmartProducts project is on industrial-manufactured, mass deployed products covering the whole lifecycle.
• SOA Platforms: In current systems the composition of services is often hardcoded, based on simple interface matching, or generated from workflows. Smart products will need a greater degree of autonomy and further self-organization concepts.
• Context-aware, Proactive Multimodal Interaction: The combination of context-aware, multimodal interaction with proactive knowledge requires substantial research in methodologies and tools for creating such interfaces for smart products. In particular, for smart products to become common and accepted it is crucial to provide a) a natural, easy-to-use, context-adequate user interface and b) a sound engineering methodology facilitating the development of such interfaces.