#facts4workers

On 3rd May the FACTS4WORKERS consortium released its first project video.

The video gives the viewers the basic information about and ideas behind the project as well as giving him/her an inside look in application of the beta prototype version for Hidria Dieseltec industrial use-case. The video filmed at Hidria’s premises in Tolmin, Slovenia and gives the first impressions of the roll-out of the solutions developed within FACTS4WORKERS project. Roll-outs at other industrial cases are planned as well and the FACTS4WORKERS consortium will keep you informed about the latest status of achievements.

Denner et al.(2015): “First version of requirements of workers and organisations”. Project Report – FACTS4WORKERS: Worker -Centric Workplaces in Smart Factories.

Download link: http://facts4workers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/FACTS4WORKERS_D1-2.pdf

Executive Summary

This document is entitled “First version of requirements of workers and organisations” and represents Deliverable 1.2 of the H2020 project “FACTS4WORKERS - Worker-Centric Workplaces in Smart Factories” (FoF 2014/636778). Building on a deep understanding of industrial workers’ individual practices, embedded in the contexts of six industrial partners (elaborated on in Deliverable 1.1), we present the first suggestions (in the form of requirements) for sociotechnical solutions that are intended to support their daily work and encourage smarter work. We structure the identified requirements as: 

23 problem scenarios that describe how the actors currently perform their work in a described context and highlight especially critical issues in their daily activities that yield improvement potential, next to …

23 activity scenarios that pick the identified issues and constitute suggestions of how the workers could be supported with sociotechnical solutions, incorporating … 

3. screen illustrations of 8 prototypes. 

Insights of the workshop at Mensch und Computer 2016.

In addition to our privious post we want to give detailed information about the subjects that attracted the attention of our 25 workshop participants on the topic of Smart Factories. The workshop provided a broad space for an interesting, interdisciplinary exchange about novel ICT solutions that will be implemented into the production environment of companies, including smart glasses, and data analytics, to mention two. In the ICT community there are currently many research topics that lay the focus on how to build up bridges between the technical breakthroughs and practical application in industrial environments. On the one hand we have to handle the technology dimension and on the other hand the human component, too.

In the first workshop session we discussed the dilemma between legal matters and user acceptance of socio-technical workplace interventions. Assistance systems that support work procedures in manufacturing can create the feeling of complete monitoring and can therefore trigger the motivation of employees, especially when they are equipped with cameras. In research legal issues are often not considered well enough, but in future there will be more need for regulations. To increase user acceptance it is highly recommended to involve experts within the development phase of ICT solutions in order to build up confidence by workers.

In the second session we talked about the challenges of combining technical functionality with practical application in the factories. With today’s software solutions it is very easy to record and store information (technical specifications and configurations), but it is still a big challenge how to obtain and provide (multimedia) content for appropriate usage in the company. And because of company-internal security requirements in most cases it is necessary to customize software or even develop an own solution which of course has to be engaged.

The third session has looked at the different dimensions of tension in product development, which raised the question if these challenges can be transferred to the world of software engineering, too. Of course both types of work can be compared, and both types of engineers face similar challenges in their working habits. However, a software engineer can easily compile software code and quickly produce or reproduce a working software artefact, if he identifies a quality problem in his code, while a product designer is not able to change the hardware part of a product-in-use. In measuring emotions regarding workers job satisfaction in smart factory environments there are many modern methods like bracelet sensors beside common measuring methods. By applying such methods we always have to consider regional and company-related conditions in the project.

FACTS4WORKERS hosted the workshop “Smart Factories: User-centered information systems for future collaboration” at the Mensch und Computer 2016 Conference which took place on September 4-7 at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. In the context of tutorials, workshops, exhibitions and demonstrations, we had the opportunity to discuss the state of the art in augmented reality technologies with colleagues. A bunch of interested people with various background (university professors, automotive industry employees, computer scientists, psychologists, software engineers) participated in the workshop and brought in their ideas to encourage fruitful discussions. Participants who handed in a scientific paper (most of them with industry use cases) presented novel insights from their recent research projects within their stimulating talks and panel discussions. Topics include for example implementation and application strategies of novel ICT solutions in manufacturing for worker centric workplaces. Slides and a few pictures can be found here.

Our contribution to this workshop right out of the project on the one hand was the organization of the workshop and on the other hand was the present an approach how to measure sociotechnical impacts on job satisfaction and how to develop smart factory solutions focusing the worker characteristics. The paper “Worker Characteristics moderate the Impact of Socio-technical Workplace Interventions on Job Satisfaction” gives detailed insights over the theoretical background of how to measure the Impact of sociotechnical interventions on job satisfaction and how to design ICT solutions.

This event enabled exciting discussions and personnel interchange about the presented topics and novel approaches regarding augmented reality techniques, error prediction models including statistical data analysis, assistance systems in learning environments and knowledge management at the shop floor and in engineering. Regarding FACTS4WORKERS the head of the department for information- and technology management of Ruhr-University Bochum was interested in further discussions in order to bring new aspects to enhance job satisfaction. The main common interest is to build bridges between technology development and usage as well as the evaluation and design of socio-technical systems in accordance with human needs and organizational structures.

The 10th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) took place in July in Stony Brook, NY, USA. RuleML is an international conference on research, applications, languages and standards for rule technologies. RuleML is the leading conference to build bridges between academia and industry in the field of rules and its applications, especially as part of the semantic technology stack.

FACTS4WORKERS was represented at RuleML by Dörthe Arndt from iMinds giving a presentation about the paper titled "Using Rules to Generate and Execute Workflows in Smart Factories" . She also took part in the panel discussion about the use of rules and rule technologies in business cases, where she especially talked about the chances and challenges of the FACTS4WORKES project.

Industrie 4.0: Der Mensch im Mittelpunkt der Produktion von morgen - Wissensmanagement für mobile Instandhalter bei der ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe AG.

Abstract. Wie lassen sich attraktive Arbeitsplätze für den Fabrikarbeiter der Zukunft gestalten? Diese Frage stellt sich im Forschungsprojekt FACTS4WORKERS, in dem 15 Forschungs- und Industriepartner aus acht europäischen Ländern über die Dauer von vier Jahrenan Möglichkeiten arbeiten, den Menschen als Schlüsselressource ins Zentrum moderner Fabrikarbeit zu rücken. Im Folgenden stellen wir die Ergebnisse der aktuell in den Unternehmen laufenden Anforderungsanalyse am Beispiel von ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe vor. Im vorgestellten Anwendungsfall „mobile Instandhaltung“ wird an einemmobil einsetzbaren Informationssystem gearbeitet, das kontextspezifische Informationen zu allen Anlagen zur Verfügung stellt und darüber hinaus den Erfahrungsaustausch mit Kollegen unterstützt.

Richter, Alexander, Lang, Ann-Kathrin, Denner, Jonathan und Wifling, Martin: Industrie 4.0: Der Mensch im Mittelpunkt der Produktion von morgen - Wissensmanagement für mobile Instandhalter bei der ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe AG. In: “Wissensmanagement, Social Collaboration und Industrie 4.0″ von Bentele, M., Niemeier, J., Schütt, P. und Weber, M. (Hrsg.), S. 29-37. Berlin 2015: GITO Verlag.

URL1: Website: http://facts4workers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/KnowTech-2015_e-Book_FACTS4WORKERS.pdf

URL2: http://blog.netsyno.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/KnowTech-2015-e-Book.pdf

Denner, Jonathan, Richter, Alexander und Lang, Ann-Kathrin: ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe: Problem solving support for mobile maintenance workers. In "Captured and structured practices of workers and contexts of organizations” von Heinrich, Peter und Richter, Alexander. Project Report - FACTS4WORKERS: Worker -Centric Workplaces in Smart Factories 2015.

Website: http://facts4workers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/F4W_D1.1_Practices.pdf

Denner, Jonathan und Richter, Alexander: Thermolympic: Paperless information management for production workers. In "Captured and structured practices of workers and contexts of organizations” von Heinrich, Peter und Richter, Alexander.  Project Report - FACTS4WORKERS: Worker-Centric Workplaces in Smart Factories 2015.

More than 750 participants from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland came together for four days to share their ideas, knowledge and experiences at the Mensch und Computer 2015 (MuC15). MuC15 is the largest annual German-speaking conference for Human-Computer/Machine-Interaction which this year took place at Stuttgart University from Sep 6 to Sep 9.

The FACTS4WORKERS project had the opportunity to organize a one-day Workshop on the topic "Smart Factories" at MuC15. We dedicated this workshop to the discussion of theories, models, technologies, demonstrators, case studies, and practical experiences on worker-centric information systems for collaboration in factories of the future.

The reactions on our call for papers was very positive and at the end we accepted 16 submissions for presentation at the workshop. The workshop took place at 8/9 and was facilitated by Alexander Richter from the University of Zurich and Alexander Stocker from Virtual Vehicle. It was organized in three sessions:

Session 1 started with an introduction giving about 30 curious workshop-participants the opportunity to brainstorm one important aspect of Smart Factories, which was then documented on a flip-chart. In the ‘main event’ of session 1 four 20 minute presentations provided valuable insights into the Smart Factory projects AMBIWISE (from DE), ASSIST40 (from AT), and SO-PC-PRO (a FP7 Factory of the Future project) sharing many commonalities with FACTS4WORKERS and into a fascinating demonstrator of a ‘control station of the future’.

 A System Architecture for Knowledge Exchange in the Industrial Domain (Fabian Quint, Jörn Kreutel, Frieder Loch, Magnus Volkmer, Peter Pollmanns)

Multimodale Interaktion in der Produktionsstätte der Zukunft (Hermann Fürntratt, Ferdinand Fuhrmann)

Mobiles Wissensmanagement in der Industrie 4.0 (Peter Brandl, Helmut Aschbacher, Sabine Hösch) ◾ Driven Improvement of Processes in Smart Factories (Udo Kannengiesser, Matthias Neubauer, Chiara Di Francescomarino, Mauro Dragoni, Chiara Ghidini, Richard Heininger)

Session 2 included eleven three minute talks on various topics relevant for Smart Factories, including useable assistance systems, PLM/PDM systems, knowledge sharing in Web 2.0 communities, secure and safe networks of smart machines, maintenance process documentation with smart glasses, OSLC and linked engineering data, competency management, federated recommender systems, interactive engineering labs, job-based usability testing and information integration. After these twelve initial talks, all participants had the opportunity to experience the presented research and conduct fruitful discussions in an open poster and demo area.

Gestaltung gebrauchstauglicher Assistenzsysteme für Industrie 4.0 (Michael Wächter, Angelika C. Bullinger)

Visual PLM - Integrating 3D data in PLM (Reiner Schlenker, Patrick Müller, Giacomo d’Antonio)

Zehn Jahre Wissensaustausch und Communities in References+ (Johannes Müller, Jaren Krchnavi, Christina Moser, Anita Weihermann-Kollar, Heiko Jahr, Nils Hennig, Morten Torchalla, Martin Amacher, Rubén André Lorenzo)

Sichere Vernetzung von Geräten in Smart Factories mit MQTT (Martin Maritsch, Christian Kittl, Thomas Ebner)

Using Smart Glasses to Document Maintenance Processes (Fabian Quint, Frieder Loch)

Smart Engineering for Smart Factories: How OSLC Could Enable Plug & Play Tool Integration (Christian Kaiser, Beate Herbst)

Kompetenzvernetzung für Wertschöpfungschampions (Steffen Kinkel, Ralph Lichtner, Brita Schemmann, Andreas P. Schmidt, Sebastian Behrendt, Michael Koch, Christine Kunzmann,  Alexander Richter)

Unified Information Access for Knowledge Workers via a Federated Recommender System (Heimo Gursch, Hermann Ziak, Roman Kern)

Kollaborative Systemkonzipierung im interaktiven Entwicklungslabor (Roman Dumitrescu, Christian Tschirner, Alexander A. Albers, Lukas Bretz)

Job-Based Usability Testing to Enhance Tool-Prototyping (Stefan Rössler, Manfred Rosenberger, Markus Pirker, Daniela Gadanji, Andrea Denger, Alexander Stocker)

Informationsvernetzungstechnologien im Bereich Automotive Engineering (Michael Spitzer, Markus Zoier, Bernd Fachbach)

Session 3 was an interactive session which gave four groups of workshop participants the opportunity to actively work on four dedicated Smart Factory Challenges. These four challenges, (1) digital assistance systems, (2) motivation and incentive systems for content creation, (3) information integration across the product lifecycle, and (4) prototype evaluation through data analytics have been developed by clustering all Smart Factory aspects provided by the participants at the start of the first session.