A Multidisciplinary Model of Problem Solving in Complex Production Systems

Abstract

Future production systems, if they want to remain competitive, need the capability to autonomously adapt to new challenges, to learn new behavior and to solve complex problems. This leads to a changing role of the employees as part of sociotechnical (production) systems, because it's mainly their capability to cope with complex problem situations that determines the capabilities of the whole system. The paper presents a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to model and to design production systems from a problem solving perspective. The modelling architecture comprises of three interacting levels. Those are described in detail as well as the propositions which could be derived from the model and its parts. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.