ICP4Life | An Integrated Collaborative Platform for Managing the Product-Service Engineering Lifecycle

The European manufacturing industry faces new challenges, which are currently not addressed by today’s products and systems. Most of the products are still in essence simple in nature, with no capability for adapting to the consumers’ needs and no integrated methods exist for the holistic acquisition and processing of feedback information emanating from product-services. ICP4Life proposes an integrated, collaborative platform for the design, development and support of product-service systems for SMEs, equipment manufacturers and energy suppliers in order to maximize the impact in the European industry.

The proposed platform comprises of three main components:

1. The first component demonstrates a collaborative web-based application for the creation and management of products and services by engineers and designers of multiple disciplines.
2. The second component is a Product-Service configuration tool for customers, enabling the easy and intuitive formation of Products and Services. The same component will be used for managing product related data pertaining to the manufacturer, supplier and the customer.
3. The third component will support the efficient, adaptive and responsive planning and decision making phases, for managing the dynamic operation of the plants and the supply chain.

All the components will be compatible with open standards, such as AutomationML, in order to make the most out of and accelerate the adoption by the European industry.

Two pilot cases are planned to be deployed in the context of demonstrating the added value of the ICP4Life developments:

1. Equipment Manufacturer: This pilot case will be implemented for evaluating the components’ developments in the configuration of the requested manufacturing equipment. The requested services will deal with maintenance support, product evolution (SW updates) and monitoring of the energy consumption as well as performance of the equipment through web-based interfaces (using additional sensors).
2. Energy Supplier: This pilot case will focus on the current needs of contemporary energy suppliers in Europe in terms of Product-Services. The main goal of this case is to investigate the potential of services in the Energy supplier industry and how time and cost related to processes can be reduced. Two different views of products will be used in this case; energy as a product service and energy related equipment (generation/ supply) as a product service.

The ICP4Life project will address the current needs of today’s manufacturers, providing faster design of modular equipment and components, the seamless collaboration of engineers across a wider network of companies as well as within a single company with disperse engineering offices and production sites and the reuse of knowledge regarding both products and processes for new projects or the configuration of existing lines. The ICP4Life consortium consists of highly skilled organizations to ensure the success of this project.