The Industry Cockpit Approach: A Framework for Flexible Real-Time Production Monitoring

Abstract

Products are becoming more and more individualized. Additionally, customer demands are increasingly more influential on the production process. The individualization is no longer restricted to the final products, but increasingly influences the processes of the entire company. Thus, an additional requirement for a manufacturing process also indirectly requires individual procedures in planning, billing, documentation and controlling. Current cockpit solutions, programmed with great effort, are inadequate since they can only be applied for a limited process variety and thus the necessary flexibility cannot be provided. However, real-time monitoring of business processes faces several challenges. Observing process executions and at the same time focusing on other tasks cannot be tackled with state-of-the-art, visualization-based process monitoring systems. In this paper, a model-based Industry Cockpit is presented which can represent data accurately and flexibly in a contextual manner for the whole company, including its products, processes, roles and machine systems. With this solution, every employee receives real-time information at the right place and at the right time.