The Social Factory: Connecting People, Machines and Data in Manufacturing for Context-Aware Exception Escalation

Abstract

Abstract-Manufacturing environments are socio-technical systems where people have to interact with machines to achieve a common goal. The goal of the fourth industrial revolution is to improve their flexibility for mass customization and rapidly changing production conditions. As a contribution towards this goal, we introduce the Social Factory: a social network with a powerful analytics backend to improve the connection between the persons working in the production environment, the manufacturing machines, and the data that is created in the process. We represent machines, people and chatbots for information provisioning as abstract users in the social network. We enable natural language based communication between them and provide a rich knowledge base and automated problem solution suggestions. Access to complex production environments thus becomes intuitive, cooperation among users improves and problems are resolved more easily.

Perceived stress in human–machine interaction in modern manufacturing environments—Results of a qualitative interview study

“…As advanced technologies progressively enter modern workplaces (Cascio & Montealegre, 2016;Day, Paquet, Scott, & Hambley, 2012), it is assumed that there will be less manual labour, whereas the amount of technology-based planning and control activities will increase (Bonekamp & Sure, 2015;Parasuraman, Sheridan, & Wickens, 2000). As a consequence, the role of the human operator is said to become that of a flexible task-switching overseer who is mainly responsible for supervisory control of working processes and troubleshooting when the automation fails (Dombrowsky & Wagner, 2014;Kassner et al, 2017;Sheridan & Parasuraman, 2005). Even though there is no commonly agreed on definition of Industry 4.0 (Hofmann & Rüsch, 2017) and the current status of the implementation of modern technologies in the industrial sector is heterogeneous (Schlund & Pokorni, 2016), the way in which the introduction of new technologies and new forms of human-machine interaction affect psychosocial working conditions and, consequently, employees' mental health has already become a matter of debate (Cascio & Montealegre, 2016;Dombrowsky & Wagner, 2014;Oborski, 2004).…”

The Digital Twin – Birth of an Integrated System in the Digital Age

“…The DT in the framework includes the human as an integral part of the human-robot hybrid work environment, which needs to ensure, that no harm is caused to the human part in the shared workstation. A different take on human integration in the I4.0 concept is presented by [22]. A so-called social factory connects human workers, machines, and data into a system resembling a social network.…”

Social Factory Architecture: Social Networking Services and Production Scenarios Through the Social Internet of Things, Services and People for the Social Operator 4.0

“…With the emergence of smarter factory environments and the Social Operator 4.0, smart wearable solutions [5], HMI technologies [6], and adaptive automation strategies [7] will play a significant role when combining different interaction mechanisms and sharing and trading control strategies between social operators, social machines and social software systems towards a 'social factory' [8].…”

“…A Social Factory is a live enterprise social network with powerful middleware and analytics backend to improve the connection between social operators, social machines and social software systems working together in a smart production environment, and the data created within the networking process [8] towards a sustainable 'learning factory' [9] [10].…”