Incident Localization and Assistance System: A case study of a Cyber-Physical Human System

One goal of the Industry 4.0 initiative is to improve horizontal and vertical knowledge sharing among industries. Horizontal sharing allows companies to exchange knowledge across different sites whereas vertical sharing allows the exchange of knowledge across hierarchical structures within a site. Sharing knowledge especially about incidents results in better products, reduces down-times and improves efficiency in industries. Horizontal and vertical knowledge sharing is a great challenge in the domain of manufacturing. We describe a case study where we replace handwritten incident and maintenance documentation. The main problems associated with handwritten documentation are bad readability and non-shareability. In this paper we describe our Incident Localization and Assistance System (ILAS), an incident documentation and maintenance system. ILAS transfers process oriented incident management knowledge from IT Service Management (ITSM) to the domain of manufacturing. ILAS offers real-time monitoring using wearables, incident analysis support and knowledge sharing for incidents within and among different production sites. We implemented ILAS as a Cyber-Physical Human System. Additionally, we conducted a survey about the potential of wearables within Industry 4.0. We found out that wearables in enterprises are still in their infancy but have great potential especially for this use case.