Back End Architecture
The approach of WP3 will be divided into two steps; the first will be the identification of the available and needed technology that will enable the Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide information to the workers and the second will be the programming activity needed to develop the Service Building Blocks (SBB).
Data2Information
An overview of the “Data2Information” transformation technologies has already been given in Deliverable3.1, where definition and explanation has been given about:
If structured data will be available within the organization, a numerical analysis based on statistical or mathematical approaches will be developed. As an example, control chart analysis approach and historical data trend has been already developed for the Deliverable 3.1.

Information is very often reported by the workers and so the format, both for easiness and to less possible interfere with working activities, is a textual description of the intervention/activity/improvement. On the other hand, it is difficult for machine to identify information through a textual description: to overcome this issue, the computational capability of modern machines is enabling the habitual utilization of Semantic Search technology. This technology uses a set of language patterns to understand the sense of the textual description and to rank them according to the request from the end user; the identified texts are proposed to the worker that will be able to choose the best option between the available.

The social factory, where all the workers are able to share knowledge and advices between them in order to make the work easier and more profitable, is one of the most important goals to be reached by FACTS4WORKERS project. The base idea of this set of improvements is the social networking approach to the information, where people can share content through a web-based portal and rank them with likes and re-shares. From the voting and social system, different intervention/activity/improvement will have a different ranking and so a higher position in the solution rank.
Service Building Blocks
Once defined the technologies, the second step of WP3 is the development of the SBBs. F4W software will be based on the RESTdesc technology, where a set of Application Programming Interfaces (API) is collected inside a SBB and automatically connected by the RESTdesc application itself that, according to the needs of the end user, prints out the needed result. APIs are the atomic level of the programming work where simple mathematical actions are developed. As atoms unite to each other to give molecules, APIs are united to each other to give back the answer in charge of the SBB. The RESTdesc unites molecules to solve the problem of the worker. With this approach, each problem that could arise in the industrial partners’ plant can be solved with a set of generic and personalized SBBs. Consequently, adding APIs to the system, it is possible to create a “living environment” where the possibility to increase the number of achievable information increases continuously. The definition of the SBB has been the starting activity of WP3. In the definition phase, the SBB has been described in order to be as general as possible.During the activities of the Task 3.1, the SBBs needed for each of the Industrial Cases (IC) have been defined and assigned to the ICs according to “Personas” defined in Deliverable1.2. In addition, the Thermolympic (THO) use case has been used to test a first demo of the software. The demo included the SBB “Defect and Solution”, that is able to provide to the worker a filtered information about the best solution to be adopted – socially rated – for an arising production problem. This demo was intended to validate the use of RESTdesc architecture and the interface with the HMI.
The list of the SBB that will be developed by WP3 partners is reported below. This list could be updated during the next year of the project, as long as the definition of the IC requirement is still on going. It is especially expected that the carry-over of the SBBs will increase, since some IC will see the good support that some modules offer to other partners and will decide to implement them too.
SBB (Back-End & Connectors) | Partner |
---|---|
Activity Planning | UZH |
Authentication | UFI |
Alarm and Warning Manageger | UFI |
Checklist | ITA |
Community Forum | UZH |
Control Charts | UFI |
Defect & Solution | UFI |
Didactic Database | UZH |
Digital Information | VUT |
Document Creation & Management | UZH |
ERP Interface | VIF |
Error Registration | VUT |
Image Analyzer | ITA |
Job Sheduler | UFI |
Lerning through Defects&Solutions | UZH |
Logbook | UZH |
Logger Module | ITA |
Machine Status | UFI |
Multimedia Management | UFI |
Offset Suggestion | UFI |
Operator Skill Profiling | UFI |
Process Start Dispatching (Business logic module) | VIF |
SAP Carry-Over Solution | VUT |
Semantic Search | IMI |
Shiftlogging | UZH |
Social Tracking | IMI |
Survey Taker | ITA |
Task Manager | UFI |
Task Review | VUT |
Training Module | ITA |
User Generated Content Rating | UFI |
Work History | UFI |
Work Package / Error Report | VUT |
Work Package Preparation | VUT |
Yellow Pages | VUT |