Quality Management

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers significant potential to enhance industrial quality control, yet successful implementation requires careful consideration of ethical and human factors. This article examines how automated surface inspection systems can be deployed to augment human capabilities while ensuring ethical integration into workflows. Through design science research, twelve stakeholders from six organizations across three continents are interviewed and twelve sociotechnical design requirements are derived. These are organized into pre-implementation and implementation/operation phases, addressing human agency, employee participation, and responsible knowledge management. Key findings include the critical importance of meaningful employee participation during pre-implementation, and maintaining human agency through experiential learning, building on existing expertise. This research contributes to ethical AI workplace implementation by providing guidelines that preserve human ...

Demographic change is exacerbating the shortage of labor and skilled workers in the manufacturing industry, making knowledge management an increasingly important issue in many companies. Collecting and preserving tacit knowledge poses a particular challenge. This study examines the extent to which large language models (LLMs) can provide meaningful support in knowledge gathering through expert interviews. Three experts test and evaluate a personalized chatbot that has been developed using ChatGPT-5. The results of the interview are promising, but the summary shows room for improvement.

Traditional quality control often falls short in high-mix, low-volume production environments due to variability and complexity. This project introduces an advanced workstation to boost industrial productivity and quality, developed with Axiomatic Design to ensure a clear link between customer needs, functional requirements, and design solutions. Combining polarization cameras, high-resolution imaging, adaptive lighting, and deep learning-based computer vision, the system performs high-accuracy inspection on quantity, quality, and compliance. A digital assistance system offers real-time feedback via an intuitive interface. Validation in a controlled environment confirmed both the system’s practical benefits and its scalability.

Decisions affecting the sustainability of products are made during the engineering process. As product engineering progresses, statements on sustainability can also be substantiated. Initially, only estimates based on related products and processes are possible, but later, operational and machine data can be used. When metrics are used for key figures, the traceability of the data should be ensured. For this purpose, relevant data quality criteria and indicators are selected and analyzed for correlations. Data availability can be increased by relying on partners within data ecosystems for product engineering. Data spaces such as Gaia-X, Catena-X and Manufacturing-X form a basis for this ambition.

Fake news are increasingly dominating the digital world. The question arises: Can modern technologies reverse this trend? The article highlights the potential of the GPT-4o language model for identifying fake news in online comments and news articles and for correcting false information. With impressive accuracy, the model shows how language technology can combat misinformation.