Proactive Knowledge for Smart Products

The project will develop the scientific and technological basis for the embedding of proactive knowledge into smart products that are able 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 embedding (physical & virtual environment), its users, and the specific use context. In contrast to static content, proactive knowledge comprises executable software and engages in proactive interaction using multimodal interfaces, thus enabling smart products to talk, guide, and assist the designers, workers and consumers. 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.By focusing on the individual product new forms of product-centred knowledge management become possible. Such concepts are urgently needed to deal with the challenges posed by the increasing complexity of products (more features and functions), the emerging diversity within products lines (customisation, variant management), the ever-growing amount of product-related content and data and the need for interoperability between products in open environments.The project aims at researching all aspects relevant to the acquisition, modelling, reasoning,management, and use of proactive knowledge. A service-oriented SmartProducts platform with support for context integration and multimodal UIs will be developed and released. Widely reusable concepts for smart products will be implemented and evaluated in three industrial application scenarios. In addition, a socio-economic analysis will also be carried out, which will evaluate the economic potential deriving from a massive deployment of smart products.This will represent a big step towards a widely applicable, standardisable approach to industrywide deployment of proactive knowledge.