Proposal of industrial product service system for oil sands mining

As new materials, new technology such as cloud computing and new configurations for the manufacturing enterprise emerge, the distinctions among mechatronics, manufacturing, and service industries become blurred. Consequently, it is expected that the definitions of Industrial Processes become even broader. Outsourcing industrial processes is a common practice and also strategy weapon for many companies to reduce costs and enhance the utilization of internal resources forming core competencies. This paper presents the concept of an industrial product-service system for oil sands mining (om-iPSS) based on the utility enhancement of oil sands mining systems. The intelligent technologies such as the cloud computing are proposed as embedding knowledge in the outsourcing-oriented om-iPSS for the whole life cycle of production process. As a result, the om-iPSS with advanced characteristics such as distributed, intelligence, adaptation and self-organization is developed in which a novel approach for enabling individualized and highly-customized production is proposed. Architecture is proposed to enable the om-iPSS from the aspects of both hardware and software. Key techniques for implementing the architecture are discussed for illustrating the use of the om-iPSS concept.