Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have sophisticated control mechanisms that help achieve optimal system operations and services. These mechanisms, imply considering multiple signal inputs in parallel, to timely respond to varying working conditions. Despite the advantages that control mechanisms convey, they bring new challenges in terms of failure prevention. The compensatory action the control exerts cause a fault masking effect, hampering fault diagnosis. Likewise, the multiple information inputs CPSs have to process can affect the timely system response to faults. This article proposes a failure prognosis method, which combines time series-based forecasting methods with statistically based classification techniques in order to investigate system degradation and failure forming on system levels. This method utilizes a new approach based on the concept of the system operation mode (SOM) that offers a novel perspective for health management that allows monitoring the system behavior, through the frequency and duration of SOMs. Validation of this method was conducted by systematically injecting faults in a cyber-physical greenhouse testbed. The obtained results demonstrate that the degradation and fault forming process can be monitored by analyzing the changes of the frequency and duration of SOMs. These indicators made possible to estimate the time to failure caused by various failures in the conducted experiments.

Collaborative design projects in Latin America between academy and industry, have been commonly focused on New Product Development processes. Nevertheless, collaborative experiences at the Fuzzy Front End (FFE) stage are more frequent between company partners to emphasize the potential for organizations to collaborate, rather than academy and industry. This paper presents the experience in the set-up and execution of an international project, so-called “First View DesignLab” organized between Universidad EAFIT and TUDelft to be executed in Colombia with five local companies in collaboration with Product Design Engineering (PDE) students. Each company proposed a company case where the objective was to find new opportunities for new product/service concepts. Design Thinking (DT) tools were used to trigger co-creation and open innovation in order to explore new opportunities by each company. Important aspects have been of great value to identify best
practices to better develop academic collaborative projects at the FFE. Reflections are presented as useful insights to enhance innovation capabilities and idea generation skills for both, academy and industry to identify opportunities.