Context-aware architecture for Industry 4.0-ready manufacturing facility

Abstract

The industry 4.0 revolution is empowering the manufacturing sector with several advantages from the production to consumption stage of products, or beyond that. Recently, operators in factories have been accumulating extensive data from machine sensors and other organizational and operational technologies such as company enterprise and planning systems. Notably, having access to extensive data is a double-edged sword. To the best of our knowledge, there is not any work in the literature that proposed architecture for industry 4.0 based on a context-aware system. The aim of this research is to provide the context-aware architecture to enhance decision-making in factories and reduce the exposure of operators to the necessary and related findings. The proposed system is contextually aware of three aspects, operator feedback for previous similar findings, specifications of products under production, and historical data of manufacturing machines. The proposed system is proactive which attracted operator attention only when the findings were contextually related, based on the aforementioned aspects. The contributions of this research an intelligent architecture, a case study, and a mathematical model.