ProSEco. Helping manufacturers design meta products

The problem

Web connected sensor technology is creating a world in which everything from products to people, spaces and services are connected and operating as a living network.

Manufacturers across all sectors are seeing this as an opportunity to add new, highly personalised product-services (meta products) to existing products. These meta products often offer environmental benefits and create new business models or maintain competitive advantage.

So a car manufacturer might use in-car sensors to understand your driving habits and offer you personalised support to optimise your car’s energy use. Or a household appliance manufacturer might wish to provide remote, condition based maintenance of your washing machine or dryer. Or a machine tool builder may seek to identify a customer’s specific usage patterns, allowing them to personalise product-services that could help that customer reduce the environmental impact of their products.

 The ProSEco project sought to provide industry with a new methodology and comprehensive ICT solution enabling the collaborative design of product-services and their associated production processes.

Tested across 4 industrial applications, it provided the project platform and featured a set of new engineering tools such as simulation and configuration designed to support collaborative work on new product-services and enhance existing tools for product/process design.

Using a cloud manufacturing approach it allowed all stakeholders within a manufacturing process to work together to offer new, eco-innovative meta products that strengthened their competitiveness in the global market.

The solution

We designed and developed a framework that provided a collaborative interactive platform for the designing of Product Extension Services (PES).

The ProSEco PES Deployment Platform is aimed at delivering a generic solution to support the Product Service System (PSS) by delivering software architecture that is capable of dynamically creating and deploying PES applications through the composition and combination of core services and other application specific services.

The collaborative platform provided a set of tools for stakeholders to come together to share knowledge, discuss ideas, debate and develop a customisable PES application that delivers eco-products and services.

It also provided an overall service level architecture framework with interfaces to the different simulation, knowledge management, communication, visualisation and dynamic configuration services required for the various forms of collaboration.