Intelligent Products: A survey

This paper presents an overview of the field of Intelligent Products. As Intelligent Products have many facets, this paper is mainly focused on the concept behind Intelligent Products, the technical foundations, and the achievable practical goals of Intelligent Products. A novel classification of Intelligent Products is introduced, which distinguishes between three orthogonal dimensions. Furthermore, the technical foundations in the areas of automatic identification and embedded processing, distributed information storage and processing, and agent-based systems are discussed, as well as the achievable practical goals in the contexts of manufacturing, supply chains, asset management, and product life cycle management.