The rapid technological enhancement and innovations in current days have changed people's thought. The use of Information Technology tools in people's daily life has changed their life style completely. The advent of various innovative smart products in the market has tremendous impact on people's lifestyle. They want to know their heart beat while they run, they need a smart car which makes them alert when they become sleepy while driving, and they need an IT tool which can make their home safer when they are out. These quests of people to the very extent have been fulfilled by development of many Meta products like wearables, smart phones, smart car etc. The concept of Meta product is based on the fact that they need to offer intelligent services to the users. In present day's Meta products market, the manufacturers have their own cloud based platform which is used by the products for which it is developed. The other products cannot use the common platform. In this paper, we propose a common cloud based platform that will be used by any Meta product's user to get different services.
Technological Innovations in recent years have led to development of many computing infrastructure such as cloud computing, intelligent computing, RFID, wearable sensor devices etc. The advent of advancement in these technologies has given birth to many products which fulfill the changing needs of the people. Intelligent products, smart products and Meta products are in the market with different level of intelligence. The intelligence level of Meta products is higher than the other intelligent products. These products communicate with environment, have decision making abilities and can recognize themselves through the product identification technologies. . Meta products are comprised of many other components to offer intelligent services to the users. Apple's iPOD is considered to be first of its kind. As per [1], "Meta Products are dedicated network of services, people, products and environment fed by the information flows made possible by the web and other ubiquitous technologies: web-enabled-productservices networks". There are various types and purposes of Meta Products. The sensors in a smart T-shirt for example records the user's heart beat and stores the data in the cloud for investigation by the experts. Similarly Google's glass is the recent example of Meta Products.
The data generated by the Meta product’s services are stored in the cloud from where users can extract the required information. The services offered by the Meta products are needed to be innovative and enhanced. The manufacturers need user’s feedback to design innovative product, experts need to answer the user’s queries in the required time and they also need to give users the proper advice. Similarly, third party service providers need to develop the service as per the requirement of the product and users must need to be assured that their personal information are secured and they can access it any time they want. To achieve all these requirements a collaborative platform is needed to be developed that can be used by all the stake holders of the Meta product’s environment. Cloud Computing is a popular technology of these days that can be used to achieve collaboration. . Cloud computing is a concept of virtualization through which user fulfill their IT demand as a service through internet. It offers the service in its three service model:-(1) Software-as-a-Service(SaaS), (2) Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS). With SaaS model, service providers provide users the different application software as a service at a very low cost. Users don’t have to buy the software rather they just have to pay for what they use. Developers develop their application by using cloud platform in the PaaS model and using IaaS model, users access software and hardware infrastructure for example they can store their data in the cloud server. The purpose of this research work is to propose a common cloud framework that can be used by all the stakeholders of Meta products environment for the various purposes. For the framework a PaaS architecture is proposed.
The rest of the paper is organized as follow: In section 2 we describe the overview of Meta-Products. Review of existing platforms is presented in section 3 with their limitations. In section 4 we propose our model for the integrated platform and finally section 5 will conclude our work.
In today’s world we have the technological as well as societal capacity that can revolutionize ours daily life style. The transition we are living now is bringing information-fuelled products and services that will be around us as a network whenever we need them. The result of finding (or designing) these increasingly clever ways to use information is what we call Meta Products [1]. A Meta-product is a customer driven customized entity having computing and sensory units that in turn are connected with cloud to providing the intelligent services to the users.
Meta-Products are defined by [1] as: “Web-enabled product-service networks”. Meta-Products consist of physical and web elements. Physical elements consist of sensors which gives input to the web elements where processing is done. Similarly, actuators are also physical elements that are used by web elements to alert or inform the users. The web elements (or services) enable Meta-Products to be multi-functional, efficient, valuable and exciting to users [2]. The overall concept of the Meta Products is explained by the following figure. In the above figure, sensors sense the required data depending on the nature of the product. These data are put into the cloud for storage, visualization and computing. In reality, meta-Products consists in three main parts, physical part (as any traditional product), electronic part (consisting on sensor networks) and web elements (services to operate them). There are different types of Meta products having different purposes. A wearable for example tracks the user’s health condition and inform them accord
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