Identifying Required Knowledge for Production System Digitalization Projects

Abstract

Digital transformations as part of currently implemented Industry 4.0 projects represent a key contribution to the competitiveness of manufacturing companies. Therefore, within several projects the development of digitalization strategies and architectures has been intended to exploit information to improve the production system. Despite successful light house projects, most practical projects failed due to insufficient integration of the relevant sources of knowledge required to ensure the successful identification of data to be provided by and about the production system, their transport paths to applications for information processing and decision making, and the proper design of these applications for production system optimization. This is mainly due to the fact, that relevant information sets and stakeholders being able to provide them are unknown. To tackle this problem, this paper introduces approaches for knowledge identification applicable to identify (i) all relevant information sets potentially required within a digitalization project related to production systems and (ii) sets of stakeholders required to be make these knowledge sets available.