Approach on How to Handle Digital Thread Information in Manufacturing with a Human-Centric Perspective Taking into Account a Didactic Factory.

Industry 4.0 is well-known nowadays and widely integrated into many production processes, but there is also a dark side of it. Many technical systems have become highly complex and are difficult to understand and maintain in detail. Familiarisation requires a certain amount of experience to understand the problems properly. Reconfiguration, adaption, or repair may cause risks of downtime and malfunction, especially for inexperienced operators. With the background of manufacturing large-scale components and mapping these to a digital thread, we extended our Industry 4.0 approach by incorporating didactic factory elements. The advantage of this approach is to scale down the production environment to a lab level and mirror difficulties and challenges against small-scale systems, as well as being able, at least in part, to scale up identified problems and solutions. The paper shows this mirroring, starting with how data can be collected, extracted and processed using a digital thread on different levels. Further, the digital thread is adapted to a use case with its information, starting with redesign through to the integration with robot simulation software. The therefor-developed application updates and integrates the parameters into the simulation on physical robots. An important part is introducing inexperienced people, next to the interaction of different software; the reading, mapping and processing of information are typical challenges in an industrial environment. This paper intends to show how giving them the possibility to try, learn and/or develop (depending on their level of knowledge and their overall task) a “miniature production facility”.