A Smart product co-design and monitoring framework via gamification and complex event processing

In the traditional software development cycle, requirements gathering is considered the most critical phase. Getting the requirements right early has become a dogma in software engineering because the correction of erroneous or incomplete requirements in later software development phases becomes overly expensive. For product-service systems (PSS), this dogma and standard requirements engineering (RE) approaches are not appropriate because classical RE is considered concluded once a product service is delivered. This paper proposes a novel framework that enables the customer and the product engineer to co-design smart products by integrating three novel and advanced technologies to support: view-based modelling, visualization and monitoring, i.e., Product-Oriented Configuration Language (PoCL), gamification and Complex Event Processing (CEP), respectively. These create a “digital-twin” model of the connected ‘smart’ factory of the future. The framework is formally founded on the novel concept of manufacturing blueprints, which are formalized knowledge-intensive structures that provide the basis for actionable PSS and production “intelligence” and a move toward more fact-based manufacturing decisions. Implementation and validation of the proposed framework through real-life case studies are ongoing to validate the applicability, utility and efficacy of the proposed solutions.