Human-centered design of assistance systems for production planning and control: The role of the human in Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is an integrated approach that transfers available technologies and the concepts of digitization and networking from everyday life into the domain of industrial production. In this paper, the role of the human in Industry 4.0 is considered by means of a best practice approach. It shows what potential lies in the human-centered design of assistance systems in production planning and control. It involves the use of a tablet computer kitted with an Industry 4.0-compatible app on the shop-floor in a production environment. From empirical investigations, we have derived design recommendations on polarity and angular character height.