Digital Factory Assistant: Conceptual Framework and Research Propositions

Nowadays, knowledge has a major role in factory efficiency. The integration of knowledge and decision support systems in the whole factory process appears as a key for the factory of the future. The basic concept of our research work is facilitating interactions between the human being in critical working situations and information set in the factory. Our proposition is to develop a “digital factory assistant” to provide factory actors with the right information, in the right time and place. Our purpose is to build a generic factory model based on context awareness and decision support models and then create relevant information and knowledge extraction mechanisms. In this paper we discuss the conceptual architecture of the desired information system.