About FACTS4WORKERS

Worker-Centric Workplaces in Smart Factories - FACTS4WORKERS is a project coordinated by VIRTUAL VEHICLE in the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission within the Factory of the Future PPP. The vision of FACTS4WORKERS is to leverage the large potential added value of manufacturing data, information and knowledge in a worker-centred way to achieve worker empowerment, resulting in higher worker satisfaction and increased worker productivity.

It is the high ambition of our project to create “FACTorieS for WORKERS” (FACTS4WORKERS), therefore a serious effort will be put into integrating already available IT enablers into a seamless & flexible Smart Factory infrastructure based on worker-centric and data-driven technology building blocks. As FACTS4WORKERS is underpinned by a clear human-centric approach: usability, user experience and technology acceptance are of the utmost project interest.

FACTS4WORKERS will develop and demonstrate workplace solutions that support the inclusion of increasing elements of knowledge work on the factory floor. These solutions will empower workers on the shop floor with smart factory ICT infrastructure. Advancement will be gained through integrating several building blocks from a flexible smart factory infrastructure, focusing on workers’ needs, expectations and requirements, and being supported by organisational measures and change management. In line with our assumptions on impacts on productivity we therefore estimate that that we can increase job satisfaction for 800,000 European workers by the year 2025.

These solutions will be developed according to the following four industrial challenges which are generalise-able to manufacturing in general: personalised augmented operator, worked-centric rich-media knowledge sharing/management, self-learning manufacturing workplaces and in-situ mobile learning in the production.
 

Moreover, FACT4WORKER‘s objectives in terms of measureable indicators are:

  • To increase problem-solving and innovation skills of workers
  • To increase cognitive job satisfaction of workers participating in the pilots
  • To increase average worker productivity by 10% for workers participating in pilots
  • To achieve TRL 5-7 on a number of worker-centric solutions through which workers become the smart element in smart factories