infonet-economy

Industrial products and services must be continually upgraded to meet changing demands of enhanced functionality and performance. The digital transformation of industry, together with new emerging technologies, enables improved solutions but at the same time cause increasing complexity and interdependence between system components. New forms of collaboration across the value chain are necessary to deliver sustainable solutions to satisfy current and future needs. The UIW-approach builds on the idea of a continuous incremental upgrade process carried out in collaborative effort between actors and stakeholders with the common objective to achieve a sustainable project life-cycle. Based on this approach a conceptual framework is defined. The UIW-framework includes an adaptation mechanism designed to account for the diverse influence factors affecting the upgrade design, a multi-disciplinary system model definition integrating actor, product and service data, and a virtual collaboration environment to facilitate the interaction between actors and a collection of tools and methods to support the collective efforts. The UIW-framework is used as a template for system implementations in installations in various actor networks.