Project Deliverable 1.3 – Detailed and Refined Industrial Challenges, Version I

The increasing demand for new and high quality products, intensive competition, and mass customization are changing the way production systems are designed and products are manufactured. Automotive manufacturing companies are especially sensitive to production disruptions and sudden production changes due to the multiplicity of demands that they are required to comply to. This has caused the emergence of new manufacturing technologies, which require highly flexible and adaptive human workers, manufacturing environments and production models. There are different needs, strategic choices and decisions in different organizations that typically determine the chosen method for production. This deliverable (D1.3) introduces the key production models in general and the related methods that manufacturing companies are applying. Each of the production methods has specific challenges and recommendations related to improving the productivity of the workplace.

D1.3 focuses especially on four Industrial Challenges defined at the factories of the industry partners of FACTS4WORKERS, which are also generalizable to other companies in the manufacturing industry. These four Industrial Challenges are 1): Personalized augmented operator, 2) Worked-centric rich-media knowledge sharing/management, 3) Self-learning manufacturing workplaces, and 4) In-situ mobile learning in the production. The Industrial Challenges are intended for testing and prototyping the smart factory building blocks at the forerunners’ factories and then transferred to the factories of followers. Taking such an approach will ensure a working transfer of the developed smart factory building blocks into other manufacturing industries.

The objective of the deliverable is also to match the Industrial Challenges with Industry Specific use cases in the industrial partners’ production environments. In addition emergent themes and trends in manufacturing are described in order to assure that our approach in the project will coincide with future trends. This is the first version of the detailed Industrial Challenges deliverable and it will be refined after each year of the FACTS4WORKERS project as the Industrial Challenges evolve.

D1.3, Detailed and Refined Industrial Challenges (version I) is part of the work in progress of the H2020 project “FACTS4WORKERS – Worker-Centric Workplaces in Smart Factories” (FoF 2014/636778). You can download the document here.