Over the last few decades, a new future of product design is emerging, where any built object or product can be embedded with sensors that can feed information back into the production process. When combined with the cloud, these systems will allow design engineers to capture, analyse, control and manage an enormous amount of data. Manufacturers can unlock the infinite possibilities of product design with Internet of Things (IoT) cloud services and make use of these products through innovative new services for consumers and revenue opportunities. With these connected and instrumented systems, our planet can now grow a central nervous system to make it smarter and safer.
Moving beyond limits
We are set to see an unprecedented growth in products that are connected to the web as it has been estimated that by the year 2020. Within the next decade, as many as 200 billion things will be interconnected- not just machines, but anything you can fit a chip or sensor into, even humans. IoT is believed to reach further than the domestic environment, with applications being developed in areas such as manufacturing, environmental monitoring, energy management, mobility, and healthcare. This explosion of technology will open up a massive wave of new product design opportunities as users change the way in which they engage with the products around them.
Optimising product design for real opportunities
One of the fascinating features and useful elements of IoT is that data can be obtained and interpreted from the connected devices. The IoT introduces a dimension of data collection unseen before. It will yield huge, diverse and dynamic data sets. This, coupled with new data analytics technologies will give constant real-world intelligence to every design engineer and manufacturer to improve their products and services. Before setting out to build their IoT infrastructure, business owners should first identify the data that has value to their business. The capture and interpretation of this data will enable businesses to optimise their product design for use and identify new and real opportunities for improvement.
It is estimated that by 2020, the Industrial IoT (IIoT) will comprise 16% of global GDP and manufacturers will spend more to seize over in new ROI. For them to establish these potential new lines of revenue, they need to ensure that their design engineers are delivering the best possible products and services to customers.
The Internet of Experience
Although the benefits of IoT are amazing, grasping the entire portfolio of established and emerging technologies that will provide those benefits can be a daunting task. When companies that build the ‘things’ fail to meet customer experience demands, the Internet of Things is destined to stumble and fall. This is why Dassault Systemes is looking to move a step further by developing solutions for ‘Internet of Experiences’ that permit business owners, design engineers, communication providers and users to see, analyse, dashboard, program and optimise their ‘things’ from within one simple, visual environment. Our solutions enable product design companies to track and understand customer specific behaviours to provide meaningful experiences.
Leveraging the opportunities, IoT allows us to develop new value-added services, a larger footprint for companies who can then reach out to new audiences and markets. By tapping the intelligence gained from the large set of data coming from real-time usages, design engineers can continuously learn, adapt, enrich and develop new content and next generation of products. Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform allows value creation, making use of the model-based system engineering capabilities. On the one hand, we provide access to 3D design data in the context of product usage; on the other hand, we allow better product design based on the insights gained from the real usage.
