Making products active with intelligent agents for supporting product lifecycle management

Modern organization paradigms within manufacturing enterprises have arose in last years, like Agile Manufacturing and collaboration, in order for enterprises to increase their productivity and be more competitive in front of shorter due dates and increasing product qualities required by customers. Most previous works on PLM and currently available systems are usually focused on the use of additional information to support business processes, and integrate limited information of lower-level applications (CAD, CAPP, etc). However, little emphasis has been put on making products more intelligent during their complete lifecycle, in order to exploit PLM information for improving their development and management. In this paper, a framework based on intelligent agents is proposed, for giving products active behaviors, in order to assist people involved in PLM to reduce lead times and costs, and improving product quality. Application of the proposed framework to a product definition example is presented as a case study.