Gathering Expert Knowledge in Process Industry

Abstract

Knowledge intensive processes are often driven and constrained by mental models of experts. Especially in industrial processes, the knowledge is not explicit but tacit in many cases, which makes it difficult to provide verbal descriptions. Modeling and prediction tasks are often not compatible or differ from the view of experts if no additional knowledge regarding the process itself or important parts of the process are identified and integrated. In industrial environments, the required knowledge is present in operators, which have to deal with the task or process on a frequent basis. Including operators during the development process may increase the quality and performance as well as trust in the resulting application. Data scientists face great difficulties in eliciting and representing the knowledge of the experts in these systems for solving the given tasks. In this paper, we will provide a review of strategies and approaches for knowledge elicitation in industrial environments. The approaches focus on applicability in industrial use-cases, whereat the operators are the main source for knowledge. The differences of the approaches are highlighted and use-cases for their application are presented. Furthermore, we will provide a discussion on using these approaches at different stages during a project as usually multiple knowledge elicitation phases are required to reach a certain goal.