Customer Co-Creation in Smart Production Ecosystems
Opportunities and Challenges for MDE
Deepak Dhungana
Siemens Corporate Technology, Siemens AG Austria, Vienna Austria
Keywords:
Customer Co-creation, Open Configuration, Smart Production Ecosystem, Model Consolidation.
Abstract:
The traditional role of customers as passive consumers is gradually changing and consumers are actively
participating in co-creation of the products they buy. This shift in paradigm has implications on how products
should be modeled and the tools around Model-driven Engineering (MDE) must consider new ways of dealing
with open-innovation, thereby preserving the privacy and intellectual property rights of the product sellers. In
this paper, we discuss how MDE can help in setting up a smart production ecosystem, enabling the interaction
between product sellers and consumers and identify some challenges in this context. Some new research
directions for MDE are outlined.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the increasing demand for individualized pro-
ducts, there is an ongoing struggle of the companies to
deal with flexibility in product design and production
processes. Many research initiatives in this area aim
to revolutionize the future of industrial production,
e.g., the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition
(SMLC)
1
, the Industrial Internet Consortium
2
, Indus-
trie 4.0
3
etc. Product designers and factories are
therefore exposing a high degree of flexibility yiel-
ding more choices for customers and enabling inno-
vative ecosystems. We refer to such collaborative net-
works of product designers, factory equipment ven-
dors, factory operators, and consumers of the products
as Smart Production Ecosystems. We have described
smart production ecosystems in detail in a recent pu-
blication (Dhungana et al., 2017b). In this paper we
focus on customer co-creation in such a ecosystem.
In a smart production ecosystem, the traditio-
nal roles of customers and product sellers are re-
defined. With access to unprecedented information,
customers are no longer passive consumers but active
co-producers and engage in behaviors that streng-
then their relationship with the product, company or
brand (Piller et al., 2005). Customer co-creation is be-
coming increasingly popular among companies, and
intensive communication with customers is generally
1
https://smartmanufacturingcoalition.org/
2
https://industrialinternetconsortium.org/
3
https://www.plattform-i40.de/
seen as a determinant of the success of a new service
or product (Gustafsson et al., 2012).
Customer co-creation can take many different
forms. Typically online brainstorming, open expert
communities, innovation groups or idea contests are
adopted by companies to drive open innovation and
engage external parties in solving internal problems
(Piller et al., 2010b). In this paper, we discuss the
idea of customer co-creation at the point of sales and
its implications for model driven engineering (MDE).
Typically, customers select and configure the pro-
ducts they require using a configurator tool. Confi-
gurators rely on formal models of how products can
be built, the kind of variability offered and the ru-
les governing the composition of the parts (Sabin and
Weigel, 1998). Such knowledge models are captu-
red using models e.g., feature models (Kang et al.,
1990) which are predefined, tested and released for
sales purposes. As these models contain crucial in-
formation about the product (design, engineering and
manufacturing details), they are typically not publis-
hed or disclosed to public – a configurator application
displays only the relevant information to the custo-
mers.
However, when allowing for customer co-creation
the customers not only select the required features to
configure the product based on the set of available op-
tions, but they may wish to add new features (request
for model changes) or may wish to modify configura-
tion rules in unforeseen ways. In doing so, the con-
Dhungana, D.
Customer Co-Creation in Smart Production Ecosystems - Opportunities and Challenges for MDE.
DOI: 10.5220/0006731206250631
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (MODELSWARD 2018), pages 625-631
ISBN: 978-989-758-283-7
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
625
Figure 1: The role of different types of models and their interactions in a smart production ecosystem.
ventional idea of MDE to consider models as univer-
sal truth is shaken. The model then becomes a star-
ting point for the customers to build upon. Models
need to change at runtime, these need to be validated
on the fly, and more importantly these models are
no longer hidden artifacts as they need to be freely
shared with customers. Customer co-creation there-
fore poses additional challenges for MDE and we dis-
cuss some of the tricky ones in this paper:
Supporting open-innovation in a model driven
smart production ecosystem.
Supporting privacy-preserving interactions bet-
ween producers and consumers.
In general, the challenges described in this paper
are not specific to open-innovation or customer co-
creation these issues tend to arise in most commu-
nity driven approaches, where MDE is adopted as a
key enable for knowlegde representation and collabo-
ration.
2 SMART PRODUCTION
ECOSYSTEM
A smart production ecosystem is a network of fac-
tory equipment vendors, factory operators, product
sellers and consumers (cf. Figure 1), interacting with
each other through a common marketplace (Dhun-
gana et al., 2017b). Interaction between stakeholders
occurs through the publication and sharing of artifacts
(models) to the marketplace.
In contrast to a conventional marketplace, in a
smart production ecosystem, the products to be pro-
duced and the production facilities are both put on
sale and the customers decide where the production
should take place. Automated marketplace servi-
ces are available to ensure the producibility of the
products in selected production facilities (Dhungana
et al., 2017a).
Automation and optimization of interactions in
such innovative markets and networks means the dif-
ferent players in the ecosystem must themselves be
smart, act smart and rely on the smartness of others.
A smart production ecosystem relies on four pillars:
Smart Products refer to goods that are put for sale
to the consumers. They are smart because they are not
only aware of their features and materialistic proper-
ties but also know how they can be manufactured, thus
they are aware of the requirements a factory must ful-
fill to produce them. Smart products are smart enough
to control their own production. A smart product mo-
del is shared through a common marketplace.
Smart Equipment refer to devices in a factory,
which publish their production skills as services and
can be deployed as autonomous service providers in a
factory. Whenever any device is put for sale, the as-
sociated equipment model describing the capabilities
of the device is shared in the marketplace.
Smart Factories are configurations of smart devi-
ces which can work together, to fulfill a certain pro-
duction order. Factories offer their production ca-
pabilities through a marketplace enabling sales of
factories as services. Smart factory models are used
in combination with smart product models to check
whether a certain product is producible in any given
factory.
Smart Customers are consumers of the smart pro-
ducts. Smart customers interact with the marketplace
by configuring the products they wish to buy, the-
reby not being limited by the set of predefined opti-
ons or features. As the marketplace allows for open-
innovation, the customers are partners in co-creation
of the products that are offered in such a marketplace.
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626
2.1 Sharing Knowledge through Models
Models are shared through a common marketplace,
as a means to drive the creation and transfer of value
through the ecosystem. Figure 2 depicts a high level
meta-model used to describe/define the artifacts in the
ecosystem. Several models are based on this meta-
model as described below.
Equipment Models refer to formal descriptions of
the factory components that can provide production
capabilities in a factory. Equipment sellers publish
the set of capabilities provided by their equipment
as Equipment Models. Each concrete equipment is
a self-contained modular unit that can execute pro-
duction operations autonomously. A common onto-
logy is shared between all the stakeholders (Capa-
bility Ontology) which is used to describe the skills
of the equipment available in the marketplace (Dhun-
gana et al., 2017b).
Factory Models refer to formal descriptions of the
production facilities. A factory is seen as a specific
configuration of the set of equipment deployed in its
premises. In the marketplace, Factory Models are cre-
ated though the selection and configuration of availa-
ble Equipment Models. Typically, a factory consists
of production equipment, storage systems, transport
systems in a specific topology.
Smart Product Models refer to goods that are put
for sale to the consumers. Products are seen as digi-
tal first-class citizens that maintain their Bill of Ma-
terial (BOM), their Bill of Process (BOP), informa-
tion about their variability as feature models, and a
mapping between the customer view and manufac-
turing view depicting the mapping between feature
variability and BOM variability). The materials of
the product’s BOM use this information to steer their
own production and their step-wise transformation to-
wards concrete product instances or product batches,
i.e., smart products (Dhungana et al., 2015).
Customer-specific Product Models represent the
output of the product open-configuration process car-
ried out by the product consumers. A configurator
presents the features to the consumers and captures
the intent of the customer to either select/deselect
an existing feature, add a new feature to the model,
change existing rules, or even change the manufactu-
ring process by changing the BOM of the product.
Production Order Models are individualized,
consolidated product models that have been revised,
adapted and amended after the costumers have parti-
cipated in a open configuration process.
2.2 Customer Co-creation and MDE
The task of a conventional Product Configurator is to
guide a customer through the derivation of a concrete
product that meets their requirements from the pro-
duct family representation (Sabin and Weigel, 1998).
Such configurators are limited in what they offer to
the customers very often the customer may wish to
have new features or variations of existing features,
which may be technically feasible but not supported
by the configurator at hand. This may be intentio-
nal from the perspective of product sellers, as they
often try to reduce the complexity of the their portfo-
lio and the simplify the production processes later on.
But with the advancements of lot-size-one production
facilities, there is often no technical reason to forbid
the customer from configuring unique products - even
outside the range of currently supported variants. This
kind of product configuration practices are referred to
as open-configuration and have been discussed in re-
cent papers (Felfernig et al., 2014). We are therefore
working on smart factories (Dhungana et al., 2017b),
which can produce any product as long as the product
itself is smart enough to steer its own production.
The result of a co-creation enabled configuration
process is two-fold (cf. Figure 3): a formal mo-
del of the product representing partial configuration
of the product required by the customer and a set of
ideas/requests for additional features and attributes of
the product. In a later step, the ideas/requests (sub-
missions) are analyzed and mapped to modeling en-
tities, so that MDE can be adopted all the way from
configuration to production.
The partial product instance generated as a result
of the configuration process could be sent to the fac-
tory as-is but it would reflect only a subset of the cu-
stomer requirements. A in depth analysis of the co-
creation submissions is needed to fulfil all the requi-
rements.
2.2.1 Analysis of Co-Creation Submissions
As depicted in Figure 3, co-creation at the point of
sales implies that the product has already been deve-
loped and it already supports most of the customer re-
quirements. By empowering the customer to submit
new requirements (e.g., new sensors, new colors, new
features), there are not only benefits but also the over-
all task of analyzing the customer requirements and
producing the unique variants becomes more challen-
ging. Model-based requirements elicitation (Dhun-
gana et al., 2011) can be adopted in such cases to
gain contextual and enable automated analysis met-
hods e.g., feature unweaving (Stoiber et al., 2010).
Customer Co-Creation in Smart Production Ecosystems - Opportunities and Challenges for MDE
627
Figure 2: UML meta model of products and factories, depicting the stakeholders who create the partial models. The Mar-
ketplace Operator models the Capabilities, which are the bridge between Products, Factories and Equipment. Adapted from
(Dhungana et al., 2017b).
The analysis of the requirements is to have a clear
understanding of whether the new requirement arti-
culated by the customer is feasible from a technical
perspective. Given the feasibility of production and
the agreement with the customer about the incurring
costs, the customer-specific variant can be approved
for production. In other cases, the customer-idea may
be rejected.
Adoption of MDE at this phase means automated
transfer of the new knowledge to the next steps in the
process chain. In particular, this could be achieved by
generation of partial models (comparable with model
snippets (Ramos et al., 2007)) that can be merged with
the formal partial model resulting from regular pro-
duct configuration. Model snippets in our approach
represent the differences between the offered variabi-
lity of the product-line and the additional wish of the
customer. Feedback (feature request from smart cu-
stomers) is broken into one or more model snippets,
which are then merged into one delta model (delta =
difference between product model released by the ow-
ner and the merge result of the snippets resulting from
a open configuration process).
2.2.2 Generation of Production Orders
A smart production marketplace enables “anytime
anywhere production”. This means, the specification
of how a product can be manufactured is incorporated
in the product model itself. This is an integral part of
the production order. In a scenario, where customers
are involved in the co-creation of the product they buy,
a reconciliation step is required to analyze the produ-
cibility of customer-specific variant (Dhungana et al.,
2017a). Given the technical producibility of the pro-
duct, production order can be generated and assigned
to a factory with the required capabilities.
The challenge from the perspective of MDE is
then to (semi-)automatically merge the customer-
specific product model (delta model resulting from
open configuration) and the partial product instance
resulting from conventional configuration. Together
they result in a production order - which can be auto-
nomously handled by a smart factory. Model merging
is not new to MDE and specially in product line en-
gineering model merging has been used for managing
evolution (Dhungana et al., 2008). Techniques for fe-
ature model merging (Segura et al., 2008) could also
be adopted to deal with the generation of production
orders.
2.2.3 Business Impact Analysis
Now that the customer-specific variant of the pro-
duct has been manufactured, it is often useful to un-
derstand the market potential of this product variant.
The primary goal of enabling customer co-creation
is to identify features of the product that are inte-
resting/relevant for all customers. This means, after
each open-configuration meaningful variable features
need to be elicited, analyzed, documented and valida-
ted. The business impact of the new features needs
to be analyzed and the evolution of the reference pro-
duct model can be planned. Customer involvement
in co-creation does not always imply that the propo-
sed variant of the product or the suggested new featu-
res should be automatically included in the reference
product. As argued by (Bonev and Hvam, 2012), it is
already a difficult task to come up with precise busi-
ness calculations when using an “old-fashioned” con-
figurator. The task of business impact analysis gets
slightly more complicated with new ideas generated
by customers at the point of sales.
Some support for evolution of product lines on fe-
ature level has been discussed by (Pleuss et al., 2012).
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628
Figure 3: Modeling artefacts and processes involved in customer co-creation at the point of sales – depicting “Open Innovation
Loop” supported by MDE)
Techniques such as feature unweaving (Stoiber et al.,
2010) can be adopted to extract variable features from
a given software requirements model. This is often re-
ferred to as product line scoping, which is the strate-
gic decision of the business owner to include/exclude
certain variants of the product in the standard port-
folio (Schmid, 2002). Delta based model transforma-
tion (Diskin et al., 2011) can be helpful in propagating
the change to the reference model, once the business
decisions have been taken.
3 CHALLENGES AND
OPPORTUNITIES
As shown in the discussion in this paper and several
other papers on related topics (Dhungana et al., 2015),
(Dhungana et al., 2017b), (Dhungana et al., 2017a),
models form a backbone for formalizing and sharing
knowledge in a smart production ecosystem. Howe-
ver, still a lot of work needs to be done to fully unfold
the potential of MDE in this area. It is important to
address these issues, as these may be some of the inhi-
biting factors for widespread adoption of MDE in this
context, cf. embedded toolkits for user co-design (Pil-
ler et al., 2010a).
3.1 Open Innovation and MDE
One of the basic aspiration of open innovation is
to harvest new product ideas/features from a larger
crowd. This means open innovation relies on a open
world assumption whatever is not known at mo-
deling time is not true. This is contradictory to the
principles of MDE where a closed world assump-
tion is the basic model of operation. Extensibility
of models is therefore a key requirement (sometimes
meta-model extensions) to support model-based open
innovation scenarios.
Innovative modeling paradigms are therefore one
of the pressing needs to unfold the potential of MDE
in this area. Several extensibility paradigms known
to software engineering could be adopted for MDE.
For example, plugin-based software extension para-
digm could be adopted to define the concept of model-
plugins, which could be integrated to the parent mo-
del and integrated at runtime. Feature oriented de-
velopment of models (not just software) could be
adopted to directly reflect the application scenarios in
open-innovation. Extensibility of model interpreters
is just as important as extensibility of the models for
enacting the models at runtime.
3.2 Digital Rights Management in MDE
Product design specifications, factory capabilities and
details of factory components typically represent cru-
cial intellectual properties of their owners (product
sellers, factory operators, factory vendors). For a
smooth operation of the smart production ecosystem,
all these entities must be formally modeled and shared
(published in marketplaces) between the stakehol-
ders. However, due to the crucial nature of the in-
formation, voluntary sharing of such models and in-
formation is very unlikely.
Future research in this area therefore need to con-
sider privacy-preserving ways of modeling the infor-
mation so that the intellectual property rights are
preserved but enough information is shared. Spe-
cial audit methods can be adopted to ensure the pro-
duction of intellectual property developed specially
for one customer (Clements et al., 2013). Some ot-
her examples of items in the research agenda are:
Encrypted sharing of models and other entities in
the ecosystem and analysis operations on encryp-
ted models (without having to fully decrypt).
Tools and techniques for detecting violation of di-
gital rights management based on the analysis of
Customer Co-Creation in Smart Production Ecosystems - Opportunities and Challenges for MDE
629
published models of products, factories and fac-
tory components.
3.3 Model Synchronization vs.
Knowledge Synchronization
A growing amount of companies is using model-
engineering techniques (MDE) for developing and
maintaining their product lines and software models.
The possibilities of describing complex systems at
different levels of abstraction and viewpoints seem to
be especially suited for product and production mo-
dels. This separation of concerns and thus, hetero-
geneity among the different partly overlapping mo-
dels, requires an increased effort in keeping those
models consistent. In complex environments, soft-
ware artifacts are modeled in different languages and
with different underlying meta-models. When models
from different vendors of factory HW and SW com-
ponents are used, the situation gets even more chal-
lenging. For the combination of or communication
between those models, MDE develops model virtua-
lization and transformation methods to support opera-
tions in a common meta-model language.
One of the most important transformation opera-
tors here is model synchronization (Giese and Wag-
ner, 2009): Since several developers are working on
the same product configurator model but may model
it from different viewpoints (e.g., product viewpoint
and factory viewpoint), changes or updates to mo-
dels can happen concurrently and must be propagated
to all other related models to solve potential incon-
sistencies. Therefore, dedicated approaches for bi-
directional model synchronization are required.
A number of model synchronization approaches
have been developed a in the last years (e.g., based on
Triple Graph Grammars (Hildebrandt et al., 2013) or
answer set programming (Cicchetti et al., 2011)), but
most of these approaches are based on syntactic syn-
chronization. Instead of focusing on model synchro-
nization, new ways of knowledge synchronization in
such ecosystems could be adopted to support mul-
tidimensional interactions in the ecosystem. There
are still open research questions concerning standar-
dization in the meta-model languages, and robust-
ness, performance and applicability of synchroniza-
tion methods in industrial environments.
4 SUMMARY AND
CONCLUSIONS
This paper presented a glimpse of some of the topics
of our research in the area of MDE. In our attempt
to establish a full-fledged model-based solution for
smart production ecosystems, we have encountered
some challenges in supporting customer co-creation
– which has been briefly discussed in this paper. The
focus of this paper was therefore not to present a so-
lution but rather to discuss the opportunities and chal-
lenges for MDE in the context of open innovation.
Adoption of MDE for a community based system
such as the smart production ecosystem have been
promising but some key features are currently difficult
to implement because of the lack of mature industrial
solutions to deal with privacy preserving interacti-
ons with models. Additionally, several other areas of
MDE need further maturity in terms of robustness of
the concepts and supporting tools, e.g., model snippet
merging, synchronization of models across organiza-
tional boundaries.
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