Prescriptive digital twins for cognitive-enriched competency development of workforce of the future in smart factories

As manufacturers increase their efforts to infuse greater resilience in their operations, they’re recognising the importance of training the workforce to keep the shop floor running, especially in times of disruption. While centrally located, long-time expert employees spend most of their time coaching less-experienced workers and workers assistance technology is getting popular in the Smart Operator literature, they do not really upskill those workers sufficiently, thus preventing manufacturing operations from performing at a consistently high level. This is even more critical nowadays as a consequence of the shift away from manual and routine work towards non-routine work. To this end, companies need an alternative solution that lessens training duration, improves skills retention, and offers situational awareness, thus sustaining a healthy and safe workforce in the perspective of human-centric cyber-physical production systems (H-CPPS). The question that motivates this project is: ‘are technologies and methods mature enough to enable a novel training strategy that prepares industrial workers for what is really coming instead of preparing them for a large set of scenarios – even very unlikely ones?’.