Performance Measurement in Sensorized Sociotechnical Manufacturing Environments

Abstract

Industry 4.0 entails the digitization of the shopfloor operations combining technologies such as internet of things-enabled sensing, cyber-physical systems, data analytics, augmented reality, and wearable devices and robots that transform the manufacturing environment into a workplace of human-machine interactive symbiosis. With the digitization of the manufacturing environment, new opportunities emerge concerning performance measurement as new sources of real-time data become available, including data collated from the operator on the shopfloor. Traditionally, the human dimension had been disjoint from the situation analysis of shopfloor performance that drives evidence based decision making. This paper presents the features and advantages of performance measurement in human-workplace interactive manufacturing where detailed data on human performance is provided by sensors and utilized to improve the performance goals. The paper is concluded with a discussion on the impact of context information management for interactive manufacturing workplaces, as a means of delivering more informed situational awareness, a critical enabler for human-machine interaction, as well as for handling complexity in disparate data sources.