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 (99% of companies in Europe), equipment manufacturers and energy suppliers in order to maximize the impact in the European industry.
The ICP4Life project proposes an integrated, collaborative platform for the design, development and support of product-service systems. A Platform As a Service conceived also as sustainable and easy to use tool for SMEs.
ICP4Life project addresses 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, services and processes, for new products or the configuration of existing lines.
By integrating three different modules (ICP4Life Designer, Customizer, Planner) to be used as single components or as integrated in a unique solution, ICP4life covers the whole lifecycle of the product-service, to measure and control the entire environmental impact of a product, through relevant services.
Two separate pilot cases have been defined in ICP4Life in an early stage so as to enhance the applicability of the developments in real life scenarios:
• The first pilot case (Equipment manufacturer) focuses on the configuration of a requested manufacturing equipment which will include sensors regarding energy monitoring, process fault detection and prediction and an additional Wi-Fi connector. The requested services deals with maintenance support, product evolution and monitoring of the energy consumption and the overall performance of the equipment.
• The second pilot case (Energy supply) focuses on the management of the energy demand creating benefit for both the customers of the energy supplier and the supplier. The customers of the energy supplier, especially the industrial ones, may use the ICP4Life Customizer to request services related to the monitoring of the energy consumption in different levels (e.g. shop floor, machine), towards changing their usage pattern and having more efficient and environmental friendly energy use behavior. This will also give the energy supplier the opportunity to balance the energy demand of customers supported by the services through encouraging them to move their energy demand away from the peak hours.
ICP4life is conceived as further steps within the frame of Industry 4.0 roadmap.
The value of the solution is based on a new approach that consider: the product-service approach; the co-design of the product service from the beginning; the empowerment of the services conceived as pay per use, according to the new generation of business model that allows SME not to afford on new investments but pay the solution per its use.
