A Stigmergic Guiding System to Facilitate the Group Decision Process

The paper presents a stigmergic approach to engineer a guiding system to facilitate the complex problem of designing the group decision processes. The system aims to provide contextual, actionable recommendations based on the knowledge and past experience of its users as recorded in a collaborative working environment implemented around the concept of stigmergic systems. Through an agent-based socio-simulation experiment we have demonstrated already the feasibility of this approach. The paper illustrates how the simulation results are transferred into a guiding system that facilitates the group decision process design through iterative queries reformulations for the identification, represen…

Human-centred Assembly: A Case Study for an Anthropocentric Cyber-physical System

Abstract To engineer the factory of the future the paper argues for an anthropocentric cyber-physical reference model that assimilate in an integrated, dynamic, structural and functional way all the required components (i.e. physical, computational and human) of a synthetic hybrid system. This is due to the real need to design large-scale complex systems that accommodate the latest achievements in factory automation where the human is not merely playing a simple and clear role inside the control-loop, but is becoming a composite factor in a highly automated system (“man-in-the-mesh”). The concept is demonstrated by instantiating our anthropocentric cyber-physical reference model in a concre…

Integrating DSS in public transportation monitoring systems

Abstract Decision Support Systems (DSS) ensure the computer-based support for the conscientious decision-making in solving problems that require a large amount of information processing and complex scenarios. DSS for Transportation (DSST) are intelligent systems that are used at operational and organizational management levels. Operating a DSST in a public transportation web-based monitoring system is presented in this paper.

On Interacting with Collective Knowledge of Group Facilitation

Group decision process design is a well-known class of ill-structured, dynamic, and going-concerns problem. The paper presents a human-computer interaction engineering approach to design a software prototype that provides personalized, contextual and actionable recommendations for this problem. The approach emphasizes the computational aspects of collective intelligence to structure these recommendations based on the collective knowledge that reflects not only the design space per se, but the collective experience in exploiting it as well. It is demonstrated by: 1) detailing the engineering issues of an implemented prototype for the group decision process design; and 2) explaining its funct…

Real-Time Assembly Support System with Hidden Markov Model and Hybrid Extensions

This paper presents a context-aware adaptive assembly assistance system meant to support factory workers by embedding predictive capabilities. The research is focused on the predictor which suggests the next assembly step. Hidden Markov models are analyzed for this purpose. Several prediction methods have been previously evaluated and the prediction by partial matching, which was the most efficient, is considered in this work as a component of a hybrid model together with an optimally configured hidden Markov model. The experimental results show that the hidden Markov model is a viable choice to predict the next assembly step, whereas the hybrid predictor is even better, outperforming in so…

Essential Enabling Technologies

The previous chapter contained presentations of several relevant collaboration methods. Section 3.1 indicated that the evolution in e-collaboration was associated with a number of technological breakthroughs.

Using Two-Level Context-Based Predictors for Assembly Assistance in Smart Factories

The paper presents some preliminary results in engineering a context-aware assistive system for manual assembly tasks. It employs context-based predictors to suggest the next steps during the manufacturing process and is based on data collected from experiments with trainees in assembling a tablet. We were interested in finding correlations between the characteristics of the workers and the way they prefer to assemble the tablet. A certain predictor is then trained with correct assembly styles extracted from the collected data and assessed against the whole dataset. Thus, we found the predictor that best matches the assembly preferences.

Assembly support systems with Markov predictors

In this paper, we analyse Markov prediction as a suitable model to suggest the next assembly step in the manufacturing process. The goal is a decision support system which can assist the workers in...

Engineering insights from an anthropocentric cyber-physical system: A case study for an assembly station

Abstract To effectively cope with the complexity of manufacturing control problems the cyber-physical systems are engineered to work in the social space. Therefore the research in the field of cyber-physical systems needs to address social aspects when this concept is adopted in factory automation. The paper argues for an anthropocentric cyber-physical reference model as the basic decomposition unit for the design of distributed manufacturing control systems. The model assimilates all the required components (i.e. physical, computational and human) of a synthetic hybrid system in an integrated way. This is due to the real need to design cyber-physical production systems where the technologi…

Engineering a Digital Twin for Manual Assembling

The paper synthesizes our preliminary work on developing a digital twin, with learning capabilities, for a system that includes cyber, physical, and social components. The system is an industrial workstation for manual assembly tasks that uses several machine learning models implemented as microservices in a hybrid architecture, a combination between the orchestrated and the event stream approaches. These models have either similar objectives but context-dependent performance, or matching functionalities when the results are fused to support real-life decisions. Some of the models are descriptive but easy to transform in inductive models with extra tuning effort, while others are purely ind…

Collaborative development of a CPS-based production system

Abstract The paper describes the collaborative processes and technologies used to develop a prototype for a Cyber-Physical Production System of USB sticks. The development of this system follows the model-based approach where co-simulations of different components, detailed at different level of abstractions, serve as a basis for structured dialogue between specialised teams and agreement on shared interactions. The focus is primarily on the co-simulation technology, allowing a gradual increase of fidelity and independent testing and validation of the composing subsystems. This technology may be equally complemented with group decision-making tools to better support the collaboration during…

Smart factory in the context of 4th industrial revolution: challenges and opportunities for Romania

Manufacturing companies, independent of operation sector and size, must be able to produce lot size one products, just-in-time at a competitive cost. Coping with this high adaptability and short reaction times proves to be very challenging. New approaches must be taken into consideration for designing modular, intelligent and cooperative production systems which are easy to integrate with the entire factory. The coined term for this network of intelligent interacting artefacts system is cyber-physical systems (CPS). CPS is often used in the context of Industry 4.0 – or what many consider the forth industrial revolution. The paper presents an overview of key technological and social requirem…

Collaboration and Decision-Making in Context

The goal of this chapter is to provide a historical account of the evolutions in the domain of the book and to set the stage for the concepts and solutions to be presented in the following chapters, including the introduction of the terminology adopted to be used throughout this text. Consequently, we aim at providing the answers to a series of questions, such as: (a) “How the organizations have been evolving over the last decades?”, (b) “Which have been the corresponding trends of the management and control schemes?”, (c) “How management and control functions are allocated to human and automation equipment?”, (d) “Which are the desirable properties of the information processing tools meant…

A stigmergic approach for social interaction design in collaboration engineering

The increasing number of available collaborative tools and their extensive use in many organizational activities has constantly raised the complexity of collaboration engineering. It presumes the design of group decision processes, supported by a wide-range of groupware tools, in an ill-structured, dynamic, and open environment. As many of these processes are recurring by nature, the development of a shared repository to store the collective knowledge and experiences of group decision process designs became a core research topic of collaboration engineering in last few years. The paper presents a human-computer interaction engineering approach to design a software prototype that provides pe…

Prediction-Based Assembly Assistance System

This paper presents the design of a prediction-based assembly assistance system for manual operations and the results obtained on the data collected from experiments of assembling a customizable product. We integrated into the proposed system a Markov predictor improved with a padding mechanism whose role is to recommend the next assembly step and to detect the worker’s errors. The predictor is trained with correct assembly patterns and tested with real assembly/manufacturing data. The proposed predictor improves the coverage and, thus, there is a significantly higher number of assembly steps which are correctly correlated with the real intentions of the workers.

Planning in Collaborative Stigmergic Workspaces

The paper investigates how the engineered capabilities of structuring the knowledge encoded in collaborative workspaces affect the collective intelligence of its users. The investigation is made for the particular case of collaborative planning and is grounded on the theoretical framework of stigmergic systems. The knowledge structure encoded in collaborative workspaces in the form of a conceptual hierarchical task network is analysed by building a multi-agent simulation to evaluate the performance of different planning strategies. The results show that different representational complexities of collaborative planning knowledge have a great impact over the collective intelligence when the u…

Goal Programming as a Decision Model for Performance-Based Budgeting

Abstract The spreadsheet applications are becoming a widely used tool for processing quantitative data and developing analytical solutions. The ability to build decision support systems (DSS) based on these spreadsheet solutions can facilitate knowledge management and increase information utilization within an organization. The paper describes the use of a spreadsheet solution to partially implement the performance-based budgeting (PB) principles for a public body. The solution builds on the goal programming optimization method and is exemplified for some real data.

Swarming Models for Facilitating Collaborative Decisions

The paper highlights the computational power of swarming models (i.e., stigmergic mechanisms) to build collaborative support systems for complex cognitive tasks such as facilitation of group decision processes (GDP) in e-meetings. Unlike traditional approaches that minimize the cognitive complexity by incorporating the facilitation knowledge into the system, stigmergic coordination mechanisms minimize the complexity by providing the system with emergent functionalities that are shaped by the environment itself through the possibility to structure it in terms of high-level cognitive artefacts. This is illustrated by conducting a socio-simulation experiment for an envisioned collaborative sof…

Genetic Algorithms: A Decision Tool in Industrial Disassembly

In the recycling process of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) the disassembly process has a central role. Disassembly is not the reverse of the assembly process, real difficulties occur in the tasks assignment process of the disassembly operations. Since this is a multi objective optimization problem, we prove that genetic algorithms provide a useful multi-criteria decision tool in the industrial disassembly process.

An Ontology Model for Interoperability and Multi-organization Data Exchange

Progress in the uptake and use of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things seems to be stalled by the colossal fragmentation of information and data standards. This complexity is compounded by issues of inter-organisational differences, hindering effective collaboration. There is a growing demand for cross-organizational integrations in regulated but decentralized environments. This paper introduces an ontology architecture where information is sliced into independent semantic layers, each focusing on a specific aspect of the data. By dissolving traditional monolithic data structures into layered, light semantic components, the necessity to maintain contextual…

The “coach” metaphor in CSCW decision making system design

Assembly Process Modeling Through Long Short-Term Memory

This paper studies Long Short-Term Memory as a component of an adaptive assembly assistance system suggesting the next manufacturing step. The final goal is an assistive system able to help the inexperienced workers in their training stage or even experienced workers who prefer such support in their manufacturing activity. In contrast with the earlier analyzed context-based techniques, Long Short-Term Memory can be applied in unknown scenarios. The evaluation was performed on the data collected previously in an experiment with 68 participants assembling as target product a customizable modular tablet. We are interested in identifying the most accurate method of next assembly step prediction…

Towards an Assembly Support System with Dynamic Bayesian Network

Due to the new technological advancements and the adoption of Industry 4.0 concepts, the manufacturing industry is now, more than ever, in a continuous transformation. This work analyzes the possibility of using dynamic Bayesian networks to predict the next assembly steps within an assembly assistance training system. The goal is to develop a support system to assist the human workers in their manufacturing activities. The evaluations were performed on a dataset collected from an experiment involving students. The experimental results show that dynamic Bayesian networks are appropriate for such a purpose, since their prediction accuracy was among the highest on new patterns. Our dynamic Bay…

Collaborative Activities and Methods

Having described the context for collaborative activities (in Chap. 1), and reviewed the basic aspects of computer supported decision-making activities (in Chap. 2), we will present in this section several specific methods used in collaborative decision making. The methods and techniques presented in the chapter are independent of the information technologies upon they are instantiated.