CaPLIM: The Next Generation of Product Lifecycle Information Management?

Product Lifecycle Information Management (PLIM) aims to enable all participants and decision-makers to have a clear, shared understanding of the product lifecycle, and to get feedback on product use conditions. Each product, whether as a physical or virtual product is designed to provide a range of services aimed at supporting daily activities of each product stakeholder (e.g., designers, manufacturers, distributors, users, repairers, or still recyclers). Such services are usually considered once, where parameters are fine-tuned once and for all. A future generation of services could attempt to self-adapt to the product context by discovering and exchanging helpful information with other devices and systems within its direct or indirect surrounding. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is a tremendous opportunity to support the development of such a new generation of services by taking advantage of powerful concepts such as context-awareness. Embedding context-awareness into the product is a possible solution to learn about the product's context and to make appropriate decisions. However, today, this is not enough because of the large number of objects, systems, networks, and users comprising the IoT that require, more than ever before, standardized ways and interfaces to exchange all kinds of information between all kinds of devices. In an IoT context, this paper opens up new research directions for providing a new generation of PLIM services by investigating context-awareness. The combination of these two visions is referred to as CaPLIM (Context-awareness & PLIM), whose originality lies in the fact that it takes maximum advantage of IoT standards, and particularly of the recent Quantum Lifecycle Management (QLM) standard proposal.