PLM and Internet of Things

July 24, 2009
Daily PLM Think Tank / Future Trends / Technology
olegshilovitsky
22 Comments
0

In my view, Internet is going to change much more things in our life than we can imagine. One of the interesting trends related to Internet and PLM, I want to discuss is called Internet of Things. This term was born first time in MIT back to 1999 in Auto-ID labs and was related to identification of physical objects. You can browse Auto-labs publication (open and available!) and see old papers related to indentification work they did.

I started to track Internet of Things in 2009 because, I think, our life becomes much connected and virtual. Many real life objects potentially can be connected to internet. With latest development of systems like Twitter, think about ability to connect multiple devices and objects of a physical world to allow them to twitt! This is almost situation when house appliance will be able to twitt to a supermarket and make online orders.

So, you can ask me “where is PLM in this story?”. Here is my take. All physical objects surrounding us designed and manufacturing with a certain level of PLM system involvement. Different manufacturing companies have various levels of PLM deployment, but most of them have CAD to create digital models, they track data about what they were engineering and manufacturing. Since we take more and more environmental responsibilities, we need to track what we designed in real life. This is where I see “internet of things” are finally connecting. I think RFID technologies is only begining in whole story of connected virtual and physical devices.

Not for today, but for the future I see blurring borders between virtual and physical life of objects… I’d recommend Shaping Things book by Bruce Sterling as good weekend reading for all CAD/CAE/CAM/PDM/PLM folks. Relax from TLAs and think about how to make life connected and reasonable with technologies we have in our hands.

I’m sure will come to discuss it more in the future and therefore, looking forward to your comments and ideas.

Samuel

This link is very relevant. For instance PLM systems offer tooling management functionality. Wouldn’t it be nice to actually know where the physical tool is at? Furthermore most companies use physical prototypes to create product data. Linking the digital data to the physical prototype of modules in the prototype could be useful too.
olegshilovitsky

Samuel, Very good point about physical and virtual prototypes. This is where we can start may be? Best, Oleg/
Nawal

Read an article a while ago written by a embedded chip designer. Her argument was that cloud computing is going to have hugh impact on embedded world more than we imagine.

Gist of argument was, most of physical devices have some kind of control on them. Most of the time, these controls are not powerful interms of their computational and memory power. But, with cloud computing, if the can connect to cloud, they can off-load lot of these heavy processing to cloud and provide lot more intelligence to these physical devices.

For many products, in not so desitant world I hope, PLM can let these devices to use the parmetric CAD models and CAE capabilties to provide intelligence during the working condition of the device.
olegshilovitsky

Nawal, thanks for your insight. I agree, Internet/cloud will impact a lot of things and be able to have model to control physical device will be very important. Best, Oleg.
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Tribster

Excellent post, I’ve been reading lots on this topic lately, maybe it will actually get going. Here is an article from a series I thought was good.
olegshilovitsky

Tribster, Thanks for link! I had chance to read the part I, but haven’t had chance to see the last one. Best, Oleg
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