Abstract
Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems have benefitted substantially from the introduction of a range of technology enablers. These include web-based and semantic computing, ubiquitous sensing, internet of things (IoT) with multi-connectivity, advanced computing architectures and digital platforms, coupled with edge or cloud side data management and analytics, and have contributed to shaping up enhanced or new data value chains in manufacturing. While parts of such data flows are increasingly automated, there is now a greater demand for more effectively integrating, rather than eliminating, human cognitive capabilities in the loop of production related processes. Human integration in Cyber-Physical environments can already be digitally supported in various ways. However, incorporating human skills and tangible knowledge requires approaches and technological solutions that facilitate the engagement of personnel within technical systems in ways that take advantage or amplify their cognitive capabilities to achieve more effective sociotechnical systems. After analysing related research, this paper introduces a novel viewpoint for enabling human in the loop engagement linked to cognitive capabilities and highlighting the role of context information management in industrial systems. Furthermore, it presents examples of technology enablers for placing the human in the loop at selected application cases relevant to production environments. Such placement benefits from the joint management of linked maintenance data and knowledge, expands the power of machine learning for asset awareness with embedded event detection, and facilitates IoT-driven analytics for product lifecycle management.
Highlights
While industrial cyber-physical systems (Colombo, Karnouskos, Shi, Yin, & Kaynak, 2016) bring together the physical and digital worlds in manufacturing, the human integration in production environments has only recently began receiving increased attention (Nunes, Zhang, & Silva, 2015)
Physical data aspects of such exchanges were handled with radio frequency identification (RFID), introducing the concept of product embedded information devices (PEID) (Kiritsis et al, 2008)
This paper makes the case for more efficient integration of human and non-human actors in sociotechnical systems
Summary
While industrial cyber-physical systems (Colombo, Karnouskos, Shi, Yin, & Kaynak, 2016) bring together the physical and digital worlds in manufacturing, the human integration in production environments has only recently began receiving increased attention (Nunes, Zhang, & Silva, 2015). Terms such as “Operator 4.0” are employed to denote the vision of human empowerment with Industry 4.0 technologies (Romero et al, 2016).
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have