A modeling method for a product life cycle focusing on representation of individual products

Individual products have a variety of states depending on their life cycle histories even if they are produced from the same design information, which represents their nominal information specified by designers. We call a specific state of an individual product as "entity information," as opposed to the nominal information. To utilize resources of products efficiently throughout the entire life cycle, this paper proposes a method for modeling both nominal information of a product life cycle and the entity information at its design stage. This method represents the nominal information with hierarchical product structure model and life cycle flow model, which we have already proposed in our previous study. In this paper, we propose a model of the entity information, which we call "Entity Information Model." Entity Information Model represents states of individual entities and the changes of the number of the entities in each life cycle process such as maintenance, collection, and end-of-life processes by recording life cycle histories of individual entities. Entity Information Model is created by using life cycic simulation technique. A case study of a smart phone is illustrated for demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed method.