Sustainable PLM through Intelligent Products

The basis for Sustainable PLM is enabling Intelligent Products to communicate between themselves and with other systems in order to reduce CO2 emissions, energy usage, and environmental damage. This type of communication between Intelligent Products and other information systems with the objective of reducing environmental impacts is an example of closed-loop product lifecycle management. The objective of the paper is to outline an architectural information system model for implementing Sustainable PLM based on experiences from a number of real-life applications. The technological challenge for developing Sustainable PLM is the high number and variety of information systems that need to communicate over organizational limits and over time. In the paper we describe how Sustainable PLM has been implemented using Intelligent Products in a number of representative real-life applications.