assistance systems

In engineer-to-order production systems, design and production processes are often carried out simultaneously to achieve shorter throughput times. Shipbuilding frequently adopts this approach. In practice, whilst this may lead to time savings, it can also result in efficiency losses. This article analyzes the causes of these inefficiencies and, as a counteractive measure, develops digital assistance systems for integration in the shipbuilding process chain. Digital assistance systems are based on a digital shadow of the shipbuilding process.

In the era of Industry 4.0, many industrial companies are facing major transformations. In the process of digitalization, factory management is adopting new technologies such as cognitive assistance systems, which has led to changes in work processes. Regarding assembly in the metal and electrical industries, it is unclear to what extent this development has promoted work-integrated learning. Therefore, the topic of this paper is a qualitative analysis that explores employees' perceptions of the learning opportunities and risks presented by cognitive assistance systems. Results: Not all assembly employees benefit equally from these new developments.

The future of shop floor management (SFM) lies in its digitization. The visualization of key performance indicators is already supported by various providers or set up by companies themselves to save time. But particularly valuable in SFM is the sustainable problem solving, which contains the knowledge of the employees in text. Therefore, approaches from Natural Language Processing (NLP) are applied to these text data to realize assistance functions. This article provides situation-specific implementation strategies.

The complexity of manual activities in different areas of a company is increasing due to smaller batch sizes, higher product variants and shorter product life cycles. The balanced provision of information ensures shorter training times, higher acceptance among employees and can be used directly at the workplace. For system implementation, organizational factors must also be considered in accordance of a socio-technical system design.

The paper describes the conception and implementation as well as offers an insight into the first results of a study with experimental design in a simulated process environment at the Research and Application Center Industry 4.0 in Potsdam. The focus is on learning processes in the field of simple work and their organization through the use of digital assistance systems. In labour research, there are indications that process knowledge is lost with the use of these systems, in the sense of a good knowledge of the entire work process in which the individual activities are embedded. To investigate the role of process knowledge in the use of digital assistance systems, a real factory situation is simulated in the experiment.