context sensitive web service engineering environment for product extensions in manufacturing industry

• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.151439
• Publication Date: 2015-01-01
• Authors: Stokic, Dragan; Correia, Ana Teresa
• Keywords: 0209 industrial biotechnology; web services; 9. Industry and infrastructure; service engineering; 02 engineering and technology; product extension services; context sensitivity; cloud manufacturing

Modern industrial companies aim to extend their products with services as fundamental value-added activities and reduce the product to be just a part of the offering. Web based services offer excellent opportunities for such product extensions. To build such services and to meet requirements of mass customization, the manufacturers of machines and equipment for production of mass customized products need powerful service engineering environments to allow for multi-directional exchange of knowledge between product design, service design and manufacturing, as well as customers and other relevant organizations across the value chain, distributed all over the globe. Specifically, they need feedback from their business customers to whom they sell their equipment, as well as from the final-product customers. The objective of this research is to create a new context sensitive, product-(web)service engineering environment based on a combination of Cloud Manufacturing, Product Data Management system and social software solutions, as well as a set of tools to support real time sharing of knowledge among various actors, from the designer up to the customer, aimed at companies producing machines for mass product manufacturers. The application of the environment in a shoe machine producer is presented.