New perspectives and results for Smart Operators in industry 4.0: A human-centered approach

Digital solutions (including Extended Reality as well as web, mobile and AI technologies), among others, are entering a broad variety of industries and modifying the capabilities of operators through (close to) real-time display of context-dependent information. However, little is known with respect to two major issues: (i) how these technologies can be seamlessly integrated for product/process and overall manufacturing system management providing of syntactic, semantic and functional interoperability and reusability among the different manufacturing systems departments; (ii) how they can be conveyed to operators also taking into account the cognitive load that is incurred by the operators. To this end, starting from a previous article (Longo et al., 2017), this article designs and proposes the KNOW4I approach and its practical implementation in an ICT platform (the KNOW4I platform) to further empower the Smart Operators concept. Two major objectives are pursued. The former is to set a standard referred to as the KNOW4I methodological approach for knowledge representation, knowledge management and digital contents management within the Smart Operator domain. The latter is the implementation of the aforementioned approach as part of the KNOW4I platform that includes a suite of Smart Utilities and Objects intelligently and interactively linked with a newly released version of the Sophos-MS digital and intelligent Assistant. Experimentations and results based on multiple KPIs are carried out to account for the effectiveness of the proposed framework.