Human-Centered Cyber Physical Production System: How Does Industry 4.0 impact on Decision-Making Tasks?

The main objective of this paper is to examine transferability of “Decision-Making tasks” between human and Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), in which the focus is on complementarity of human-CPPS in contrast to substitutability. We hold a hybrid approach combining qualitative and quantitative models to investigate human competence levels and autonomy degree of the technological components. The qualitative analysis leads to establish the Vector of Competence and Autonomy (VCA) for identifying the extent of human-CPPS collaboration in decision-making. The quantitative analysis involves human factors such as and operation/handling time, error probability rate and learnability rate in association to various combination of technological components of Digital Assistance Systems (DAS) with different automation degrees. We instantiate the VCA using the outcomes of quantitative analysis. Applying a set of rules, we interpret VCA values, infer the current state of complementarity, and identify feasible radical or incremental transitions to reach the optimal (desired) level of human-CPPS collaboration in a smart factory. The entire approach contributes in identifying the impact of Industry 4.0 on human-CPPS complementarity in decision-making tasks, which is investigated in the context of TU Wien Pilot Factory Industry 4.0.