Integrating Worker Assistance Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning in Industry 4.0

Maximizing the quality and quantity of production output requires the optimization of every single process involved in the production - separately on its own and in combination with other involved processes and assets along the line. Worker assistance systems further optimize otherwise automated production systems by minimizing uncertainties of incorporated manual labor. This paper, subsequent to an elaborate use case and requirements analysis, develops a concept to advance these worker assistance systems from more or less isolated applications, that operate independently from other production and resource management platforms, towards an integrated solution using Industry 4.0-compliant Digital Twins of assistance jobs, products, workers and workstations, that document manually executed processes, their parameters, performances and configurations in an interoperable manner. Consequently, worker assistance systems will be established with little effort as a user- and process-specific enterprise resource planning frontend on the shop floor.