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Using Tacit Expert Knowledge to Support Shop-floor Operators Through a Knowledge-based Assistance System

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The increasing complexity of industrial production systems is challenging employees on the shop-floor in their daily work. Specific knowledge about manufacturing processes is often not available in explicit form but mainly as tacit knowledge of experienced shop-floor workers. A systematic approach to knowledge externalization and reuse is required to make this operational knowledge available. This paper proposes a method to systematically capture and structure expert knowledge while incorporating knowledge management and social research methods. The proposed method's application and evaluation occur in a continuous manufacturing scenario, externalizing tacit knowledge about coping with manufacturing anomalies. A digital assistance system is designed and prototypically implemented to manage and reuse the externalized knowledge. The early involvement of shop-floor workers in the development phase of the prototype ensures usability and user acceptance of the assistance system. The assistance system is developed as a collaboration supporting artifact in the shop-floor's common information space. To observe the resulting productivity performance improvements in the manufacturing scenario, a KPI-based evaluation of the assistance system is presented. Finally, a discussion about the major contributions of this paper, namely the development of an approach for knowledge externalization and a human-centered design of an assistance system, takes place. To assess the novelty of these approaches, they are contrasted with the state of the art identified in the literature before a final summary of the results is presented.

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Hoerner, Lorenz; Schamberger, Markus; Bodendorf, Freimut (2023): Using Tacit Expert Knowledge to Support Shop-floor Operators Through a Knowledge-based Assistance System. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 32, No. 1. DOI: 10.1007/s10606-022-09445-4. Springer. ISSN: 1573-7551. pp. 55-91

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Assistance system, Continuous manufacturing, Expert knowledge, Implicit knowledge, Knowledge externalization, Knowledge management, Manufacturing scenario, Prototypical implementation, Shop-floor

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