The social factory: Connecting people, machines and data in manufacturing for context-aware exception escalation

Abstract

Manufacturing environments are socio-technical systems where people have to interact with machines to achieve a common goal. The goal of the fourth industrial revolution is to improve their flexibility for mass customization and rapidly changing production conditions. As a contribution towards this goal, we introduce the Social Factory: a social network with a powerful analytics backend to improve the connection between the persons working in the production environment, the manufacturing machines, and the data that is created in the process. We represent machines, people and chatbots for information provisioning as abstract users in the social network. We enable natural language based communication between them and provide a rich knowledge base and automated problem solution suggestions. Access to complex production environments thus becomes intuitive, cooperation among users improves and problems are resolved more easily.