Establishing and Maintaining Situation Awareness for Shop-Floor Assistance in Manufacturing

We report on design and implementation of a situation awareness module for a site-wide assistance system in manufacturing plants. We design individual assistance units that are able to support workers interactively, on the shop floor and we enable these units to keep track of the shop-floor situation at the level of workers' cells. Each work cell is thus logically monitored by an assistance unit that is aware of workers, manufacturing tasks and subtasks, as well as having an inventory of components and equipment used by the workers, to accomplish their tasks. Input from multiple sensors is translated into streams of observations expressed at a higher conceptual level, so that they can be interpreted w.r.t. a pre-defined, discrete knowledge model.