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As the business model changes from one of selling products (e.g. aircraft engines) and spare parts to a business model (driven by customer demand) of selling services (e.g. Total Care), the new product designer and the new service designer require significantly increased access to data on the behaviour of existing products in the field. They also need to align their own processes and cost modeling. IPAS addresses these issues by integrating these three very different worlds as shown on our logo. The separation of these worlds by geography, organisation, culture and time (decades), and their different information needs, make their integration very challenging.

The objective of this project is to develop and exploit technologies such as meta-data, semantics, ontologies, text mining, search, social interactions, knowledge representation and semantic web services to enable the right information to be provided to the right person in the right form at the right time. Process modeling, simulation and optimisation will be critical in understanding the interdependencies and information needs and in developing multiple ontologies to support information provision and systems interoperability. New applications will be developed that utilise large-scale heterogeneous networks, globally distributed databases and GRID computing power, that are required to carry out large complex searches quickly and enable computationally expensive Life Cycle Cost (LCC) modeling

A fundamental shift is occurring in many industries away from the selling of products (e.g. cars) to the provision of services (e.g. transport, car leasing). Essential to the long-term success of businesses in this emerging global environment is the creation of new Integrated Products And Services (IPAS). These require knowledge transfer between three very different worlds: new service design, new product design, and the operation of existing products and services in the field. IPAS will integrate and apply a number of disparate generic technologies that are currently in the research phase and span the disciplines of computer science, engineering design, knowledge management, manufacturing and work psychology. IPAS will significantly improve these generic technologies, which are critical to the effective exploitation of intra and inter-enterprise computing, and validate them by application to a complex real world challenge. IPAS deliverables include: a Designer Knowledge Desktop, defined work social issues and solutions, process simulations and optimisation, and a life cycle cost modeling toolkit.

Uniting three worlds

IPAS is part funded by the Department of Trade and Industry under the Technology Program.  DTI Reference TP/2/IC/6/I/10292