Towards Product Avatars Representing Middle-of-Life Information for Improving Design, Development and Manufacturing Processes

In today’s globalized world, customers increasingly expect physical products and related information of the highest quality. New developments bring the entire product lifecycle into focus. Accordingly, an emphasis must be placed upon the need to actively manage and share product lifecycle information. The so-called Product Avatar represents an interesting approach to administrate the communication between intelligent products and their stakeholders along the product lifecycle. After its initial introduction as a technical concept, the product avatar now revolves around the idea individualized digital counterparts as targeted digital representations of products enabling stakeholders to benefit from value-added services built on product lifecycle information generated and shared by Intelligent Products. In this paper, first the concept of using a Product Avatar representation of product lifecycle information to improve the first phases, namely design, development and manufacturing will be elaborated on. This will be followed by a real life example of a leisure boat manufacturer incorporating these principles to make the theoretical concept more feasible.