The Impact of Collaborative Decision-Making in a Smart Manufacturing Environment: Case Study Using an Automated Water Bottling Plant

Abstract

With the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), following three previous industrial revolutions, many disruptive technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Services, Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and big data are rapidly advancing throughout the world. Smart Manufacturing integrates these expeditious advancement of technologies related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution at the center of advancing automated structures. Preceding research within the Industry 4.0 research environment has for the most part focused on connecting machines and digital systems in an autonomous environment. However, the integration of humans within Industry 4.0 need to be considered as many industrial settings still make use of mixed environments. Within these environments the completion of processes are dependent on the cooperation between human workers and automated systems. At this time there is limited research on the development of collaborative decision-making where the human’s adjustment and acknowledgment to the method is taken into consideration. A research gap identifying the lack of processes involving collaborative decision-making, has been established as the productive setup of an automated system relies greatly on the Human–Machine Interaction (HMI) between the machines and the human operator. The case study of a water bottling plant is utilized in this research to create a separation between the collection of tasks that need to be done by a machine as well as a human related to a Smart Manufacturing Environment. Even though the new technologies employed in Industry 4.0 may predict or detect a shift in procedure, human intervention and decision-making are still of critical importance. The paper initially discusses how the water bottling plant was modeled. Secondly, the paper then discusses collaborative decision-making with reference to possible models for collaborative decision-making and introduces a HMI used for intervention in the automated process. The paper is rounded off by discussing the results and impact of collaborative decision-making in the automated procedure related to the case study.