Visualisation for Informed Decision-Making in Industry 4.0 : Affordances and limitations of incorporating contextual knowledge management and visualisation into a downtime management tool

Sammanfattning: The main objective of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is to advance and ensure better manufacturing efficiency, productivity, and flexibility through the smart use of emergent technologies to enable the development of digital tools to visualise crucial information regarding factory events, products, and processes. As these systems grow in complexity, more information will be necessary to learn how to use them, and thus, more expertise and knowledge will be required to handle them. This study was therefore conducted with the aim to investigate the affordances and limitations of incorporating knowledge management and knowledge visualisation into a downtime management tool at a manufacturing company. This study has gathered findings from users through user interviews and contextual inquiries to provide insights and experiences on the existing downtime management tool. Thereafter, a first iteration of a prototype was designed and evaluated through a heuristic evaluation to investigate the applicability of knowledge management and visualisation concepts in the tool. A second design iteration was then developed to be evaluated with 10 users. This study resulted in overall positive attitudes towards knowledge sharing and user ownership concerning the knowledge-enhanced downtime management tool. Therefore, there are affordances of utilising knowledge management and visualisation to increase knowledge sharing between peers, it can help them in making more informed decisions, and the tool can support both new and experienced users when categorising downtime issues. However, it is essential to take into consideration the time and effort to maintain such a system, and to investigate the long-term effects of incorporating such concepts into different I4.0 tools.