UNDERSTANDING USAGE DATA-DRIVEN PRODUCT PLANNING: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are able the collect huge amounts of data about themselves, their users, and their environment during their usage phase. By feeding these usage data back into product planning, manufacturers can optimize their engineering and decision-making processes. Despite promising potentials, most manufacturers still do not analyze usage data within product planning. Also, research on usage data-driven product planning is scarce. Therefore, this paper aims to identify the main concepts, advantages, success factors and challenges of usage data-driven product planning. To answer the corresponding research questions, a comprehensive systematic literature review is conducted. From its results, a detailed description of usage data-driven product planning consisting of six main concepts is derived. Furthermore, taxonomies for the advantages, success factors and challenges of usage data-driven product planning are presented. The six main concepts and the three taxonomies allow for a deeper understanding of the topic while highlighting necessary future actions and research needs.

Sustainable Consumer Behavior in Purchasing, Using and Disposing of Clothes

In this study we investigate how consumers in The Netherlands can be persuaded to adopt sustainable practices when purchasing, using and disposing of clothes. This study investigates the attitude-behavior gap for the sustainable choices for purchase, use and disposing of clothes. For each consumption phase we ran a two-step multiple regression. The findings showed that the importance of the factors vary in the three consumption phases. For purchasing and disposal decisions, the core motivator social motivation predicts sustainable practices best, while it has no role in the usage phase. The factor ability appeared to have a significant role in the disposal phase, but not in the other phases. Finally, the trigger appears to lower the consumers’ ability in the purchasing phase, while it enhances the core motivator social evaluation in the disposal phase.

Evaluating Smart PSS Solutions with Context-Awareness in Usage Phase

With the mature development of IoT techniques, smart PSS emphasizes the digital transformation of the traditional PSS, which is an ever-evolving and value-co-creation system with the participation of users through the whole product lifecycle, especially during the usage stage. Due to the frequent changes of usage situations, the smart PSS providers are supposed to evolve their product-service bundles according to the trends of usage situations. It is critical to determine what is the current uasge situation, thereafter to evaluate and select proper product-service bundles during the usage phase. In this article, we propose a context-aware approach to evaluate the smart PSS performance during the usage phase.

Testing and Improving an ISO 14119-Inspired Tool to Prevent Bypassing Safeguards on Industrial Machines

Various safety-related standards associated with the machinery design phase, such as ISO 14119:2013, emphasize the appropriate design and selection of protective devices to prevent bypassing. Despite such standards, bypassing safeguards is a common issue at the machinery use phase. ISO 12100:2010 indicates, “experience has shown that even well-designed safeguarding can fail or be violated”. This unsafe practice can cause serious injuries or fatalities. This paper presents an improved version of a bypassing-related assessment tool initially inspired by ISO 14119. The improvement results from testing its performance through industrial case studies to explore how the tool works in reality. Five occupational health and safety (OHS) practitioners apply this tool in four plants in Quebec to 18 machines and 37 activities. Afterwards, the OHS practitioners provide feedback using a questionnaire. The findings reveal that the tool is appropriate for the machine usage phase to prevent bypassing with an overall 82% satisfaction score. The probability levels of bypassing given by the tool enable a safety improvement prioritization method for the machines and safeguards. The tool was improved, redefining some incentives to bypass and its layout. The findings explain how practitioners could influence decision-making to minimize incentives to bypass and the probability of bypassing to prevent accidents.

Unsupervised Detection of Changes in Usage-Phases of a Mobile App

Under the fierce competition and budget constraints, most mobile apps are launched without sufficient tests. Thus, there exists a great demand for automated app testing. Recent developments in various machine learning techniques have made automated app testing a promising alternative to manual testing. This work proposes novel approaches for one of the core functionalities of automated app testing: the detection of changes in usage-phases of a mobile app. Because of the flexibility of app development languages and the lack of standards, each mobile app is very different from other apps. Furthermore, the graphical user interfaces for similar functionalities are rarely consistent or similar. Thus, we propose methods detecting usage-phase changes through object recognition and metrics utilizing graphs and generative models. Contrary to the existing change detection methods requiring learning models, the proposed methods eliminate the burden of training models. This elimination of training is suitable for mobile app testing whose typical usage-phase is composed of less than 10 screenshots. Our experimental results on commercial mobile apps show promising improvement over the state-of-the-practice method based on SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform).

APPLYING MODEL-BASED SYSTEMS ENGINEERING TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTONOMOUS VESSEL FUNCTIONS

Developing autonomous functions for complex systems leads to high demands on the consideration of dependencies to external actors in the usage phase. In Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), this can be achieved by modelling operational aspects. Operational aspects are model elements and their relationships to each other. In this contribution, modelling of operational aspects with a MBSE-approach will be demonstrated exemplary on a case study related to the development of a yacht with an autonomous docking assistant. Currently modelling operational aspects is not common in the civil sector.