PLM and Internet of Things

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.