Smart virtual product development (SVPD) to enhance product manufacturing in industry 4.0

This paper presents a system capable of enhancing product development process for industrial manufactured products. The system is known as Smart Virtual Product Development (SVPD), and it helps in decision making by using explicit knowledge of formal decision events. It stores and reuses the past decisional events or set of experiences related to different activities involved in industrial product development process i.e. product design, manufacturing, and product inspection. This system can be potentially used in large enterprises manufacturing a range of similar products in mass production, or a group of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This research explains that how product manufacturing can be enhanced by using SVPD in Industry 4.0, where cyber-physical systems have to play the key role. The analysis of basic concepts and implementation method proves that this is an expert system facilitating product manufacturing which can play a vital role towards Industry 4.0.