Simulations Based on Product-Usage Information from Connected Products to Support Redesign for Improved Performance

Abstract

The real-life use of a product is often hard to foresee during its development. Fortunately, today's connective products offer the opportunity to collect information about user actions, which enables companies to investigate the actual use for the benefit of next-generation products. A promising application opportunity is to input the information to engineering simulations and increase their realism to (i) reveal how use-related phenomena influence product performance and (ii) to evaluate design variations on how they succeed in coping with real users and their behaviors. In this article, we explore time-stamped usage data from connected fridge-freezers by investigating energy losses caused by door openings and by evaluating control-related design variations aimed at mitigating these effects. By using a fast-executing simulation setup, we could simulate much faster than real time and investigate usage over a longer time. We showed that a simple, single-cycle load pattern based on aggregated input data can be simulated even faster but only produce rough estimates of the outcomes. Our model was devised to explore application potential rather than producing the most accurate predictions. Subject to this reservation, our outcomes indicate that door openings do not affect energy consumption as much as some literature suggests. Through what-if studies we could evaluate three design variations and nevertheless point out that particular solution elements resulted in more energy-efficient ways of dealing with door openings. Based on our findings, we discuss possible impacts on product design practice for companies seeking to collect and exploit usage data from connected products in combination with simulations.