Towards knowledge capturing and innovative human-system interface in an open-source factory modelling and simulation environment

The capital value of knowledge is fundamental in modern cyber-physical systems. The user is provided with information from multiple and sometimes conflicting sources. This large amount of information must then be analyzed and interpreted by the human brain. Information must be used in a profitable way, and transformed into useable knowledge, which can then be effectively used in decision making activities. It is therefore critical to provide the required information and knowledge in order to support digital factory activities such as modelling and simulation of manufacturing systems. The advent and implementation of Industry 4.0 will make it a requirement for virtual planning and real systems within smart factories, to interact and share large quantities of information with each other. In this respect, one of the major challenges is making sure that the right people have the right information, at the right time to make the right decisions. The aim of this research is to provide a multi-level just-in-time simulation tool to support decision making in digital factory planning. The tool makes use of a suitable means for the capturing and representation of manufacturing system knowledge in several types of industrial sectors and types of companies (large, SME). Furthermore, to support the modelling activity, the human-system interface of the simulation tool makes use of just-in-time information retrieval (JITIR). The aim of JITIR is to proactively yet non-intrusively provide the required information at the right time based on the users' context during the modeling and simulation activity. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).