Towards an integrated approach for supporting the workers in Industry 4.0

Assisting and supporting human operators in modern industry is becoming crucial to increase the efficiency. Available tools, like use and maintenance manual, have a complex organization due to variety of information treated and purposes. Confusion and disorientation bring a series of disadvantages that increase the cognitive effort of the users. Tasks such as set-up, maintenance, and troubleshooting, strongly depend on the skills of human operators. To tackle this problem, in this paper we present an integrated approach with the aim of developing a thorough system that starts from a structured management of technical documen- tation and provides useful support to the users during their work. The approach is composed by three phases i) Data organization and management, obtaining with a standard that allows to edit and manage the information in a structured way; ii) Content extraction and filtering, for collecting the technical labelled information; iii) Support to the user during use and maintenance of the machine, consisting in a set of on-line tools. At the end of this paper, we present an application of the proposed approach to the specific case of troubleshooting support, by considering MyAID, a tool designed to assist operators to solve machine failures.