Context-aware decision information packages: An approach to human-centric smart factories

Abstract

Industry 4.0 enables the integration of new trends, such as data-intensive cyber physical systems, Internet of Things, or mobile applications, into production environments. Although it concentrates on highly data-intensive automated engineering and manufacturing processing, the human actor is still important for decision making in the product lifecycle process. To support correct and efficient decision making, human actors have to be provided with relevant data depending on the current context. This data needs to be retrieved from distributed sources like bill of material systems, product data management and manufacturing execution systems, holding product model and factory model. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing the concept of decision information packages, which enable to compose relevant engineering data for a specific context from distributed data sources. To determine relevant data, we specify a context-aware engineering data model and corresponding operators. To realize our approach, we provide an architecture and a prototypical implementation based on requirements of a real case scenario.