Industry 4.0 Learning Factory: A Canvas for Specifications

Abstract

The digitalisation increase in industrial processes is perceived as an opportunity to grow up the competitiveness of companies. Data is more and more accessible, potentially allowing making better decisions at all levels of the company. Then, job profiles and their required skills are changing, becoming more and more focused on new technologies and information systems. The most effective way to acquire necessary skills is a “learning by doing” way in industrial projects and processes. At the crossroad of the academic and the industrial environment, a Learning Factory becomes the most appropriate pedagogical mean. It allows running combinations of theoretical and applied tools in the context of industry 4.0. On the other hand, a LF can also be used to design and to simulate production systems in order to optimize the transition to industry 4.0. The transition 4.0 addresses both technological and industrial needs. A LF 4.0 project must also meet extra pedagogical needs. The interactions between these needs are complex and make LF 4.0 projects special, especially for the specification refinement phase. In this paper we propose a model and a canvas to develop pertaining specifications for a LF 4.0. The originality of our work is to consider the analysis of the technological, industrial and pedagogical needs to formalize the specifications. Based on these proposals, the University of Strasbourg evolved its existing LF for the manufacturing industry for the 4.0. In this paper, we illustrate our proposal from this project.