Social factory architecture: Social networking services and production scenarios through the social internet of things, services and people for the social operator 4.0

Abstract

The prevailing industrial digitalisation flagship initiative, Industrie 4.0, gathers a substantial part of its functionality from the human in the system. This will drive a need for focus on both human and social dimensions of technology. The paper explores the roles of the Social Operator 4.0 in smart and social factory environments, where humans, machines and software systems will cooperate (socialise) in real-time to support manufacturing and services operations. A Social Factory Architecture based on adaptive, collaborative and intelligent multi-agent system is proposed for enabling such cooperation. Further, production scenarios are proposed, to show how social operators, social machines, and social software systems will communicate and cooperate via enterprise social networking services to accomplish production goals in the Social Internet of Things, Services and People.