Extending the Sliced V-Model to Smart Product Development

The increasing industrial digitization is the driver for the fast emergence of many industrial smart products. To stay competitive, the manufacturing companies of these smart products need to optimize their internal lifecycleprocesses. Mainly, they have to converge the software and hardware lifecycleprocesses. However, even if this strategic necessity has been recognized, manufacturing companies struggle to develop and implement a roadmap of such convergence.Starting point for the realization of harmonized lifecycle processes are processmodels describing process activities and the underlying data models. This research addresses the latter one and aims to create a generic lifecycle data model. The research team created and evaluated such data model referring to development artifacts such as requirements, parts or test cases and to lifecycle artifacts such as revisions, versions and baselines. The generic lifecycle management model was evaluated by a practical development of a smart product. By this, the research provides a valuable result to maintain and increase the competitiveness of manufacturing companies.