Collaborative maintenance in flow-line manufacturing environments: An Industry 4.0 approach

In a manufacturing shop-floor, context-aware intelligent service systems, along with mobile solutions can be used for the provision of information services to shop-floor personnel according to their situation. This paper presents an Industry 4.0 system that provides decision support for line operators and maintenance personnel, in an industrial production scenario, where maintenance needs immediate response. A multi-layered, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based system, which integrates several sub-systems, such as sensor data fusion, context modelling and contextual data information provision has been developed. The solution includes a number of context-aware apps that support the collaborating users to address maintenance issues. A case study was conducted, providing insight into the suitability of the proposed solution and bringing to light further aspects that will improve the proposed context-aware system. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.