Industry 4.0 and human factor: How is technology changing the role of the maintenance operator?

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is revolutionizing not only the manufacturing industry but also maintenance strategies. As consequence of the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies, new skills are demanded to maintenance operators that has to be able to interact, as instance, with Cyber Physical Systems and robots. In this paper, we first investigate the state-of-the-art of Industry 4.0 technologies that are transforming operations and production management and finally we discuss how the role of maintenance operators is changed in a such digitalized environment. We found that, the maintenance Operator 4.0 should be able to find relevant information and predict events by a proper use of Big Data analytics, in addition to the ability of interacting with computers, digital databases and robots. Finally, the ability to rapidly adapt his skills to innovations is also strongly demanded.