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.