Enabling Smart Manufacturing with Visual Analytics for Plant Workers

Smart manufacturing is increasingly making use of visual analytics to optimize production or to identify early problem signs [Su19]. However, current solutions and approaches require professionals, especially from the data science area, to make use of it, which is for most production companies not affordable. In this paper, we describe first a best practice to sensorize plants from the wood and beverage industry to enable smart manufacturing in general. Second, we describe a new approach that aims at providing easy-to-use visual analytics functionalities that are designed to be used directly by plant workers. Plant workers usually have encompassing experience in the production and the plant, but lack of computer experience and corresponding mathematical knowledge for data analysis. Through lowering the barriers for plant workers in performing data analysis of the IoT sensors with simplified and almost automated analysis functions would give them the ability to gain insights into the production and achieve similar production optimizations and problem preventions as data science experts could. The main contributions of this article are on the one hand the best practice of how production lines of the wood and beverage industry could be made ready for smart manufacturing, but also an approaches that enable non-data scientists, especially plant workers, to perform sufficient analysis about optimal production settings and early problem cause identification.