Knowledge-based feedback integration to facilitate sustainable product innovation

Since real product use information is not available, Design Simulation and Design Methods rely in many ways on assumptions regarding the product use today. These assumptions generally differ from the real conditions of product use. There are various reasons for not feeding back product use information. First, current business models lead to a loss of access to the product after sale. Second, due to their price and size appropriate sensors are only rarely embedded in the product. Third, there is a lack of an integrated framework for feeding back product use information into product development. This paper presents a new solution approach for the integration of product use information into product development. The first part of the paper provides a summary of the developed solution. While aspects like data management and knowledge discovery have been covered in previous work, this paper focuses on the representation of empirical product use information and the use of knowledge based inference methods in order to carry out ¿What-If¿ analyses. These can serve the product developer to improve the design of next generation products.