Memory tracking of the health state of smart products in their lifecycle

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a strategic approach to manage the product /equipment related information efficiently over the whole product lifecycle. To meet this target, a PLM system is developed in this study to track the status of a product/ equipment and its evolution and to analyze problems that may occur at any stage of its life cycle. This paper deals with the generation of an intelligent product that is capable of monitoring and capitalizing its own heath state during its whole life. An approach of knowledge capitalization was developed to construct a memory that identifies the health state of equipment for its whole life. This memory is distributed into a short term memory located at the RFID tag that is associated with the equipment and a long term memory that capitalizes all the information concerning the equipment. This embedded memory is readable directly thanks to the RFID Reader, and provides the information that helps the decision concerning the recycling or not of products/equipments.