Contribution to the Formalization of Individualized Processes during Product Innovation

Over the years, innovation has become the central element of enterprise strategy. It is only thanks to innovation that a product or a service differentiates from its competitors and creates the conditions for growth. Nowadays, innovative enterprises have to consider two aspects about new product development: (1) that it generates large product variability and (2) that it increasingly tends to regard the needs of particular customers. These two angles related to product innovation activities cause an enhancement of informational complexity. This situation complicates the management of the product’s information, especially during the first phases of its lifecycle. The Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) aims to integrate product information within an information system all through its life cycle. Product traceability throughout the PLM has been improved thanks to PLM Software and the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology. In particular, this technology allows collecting information individually on a given product. Our work takes part in the scope of “Product-Driven Systems”. Since the product carries information, it has been given an active role during its production. It interacts individually with some parts of its production system. However, this notion of individualization still hasn’t been well identified. Indeed, up to date, there is no characterization that could permit a better comprehension of what product and process individualization are about. Our aim is to make a contribution to this formalization and characterization of an individualized product. Principally, our objective is to propose an intelligible and coherent representation of an individualized product and of its relationship with its production system during the product innovation phases in the context of Systems Engineering (SE). In this paper we present the state of the art of the concepts, theories, approaches, modeling languages and modeling tools to achieve our objective. We present as well the first models that have resulted from our research. These models are still to be developed. Finally, we give a conclusion and perspectives of our future work.