Human in the loop: industry 4.0 technologies and scenarios for worker mediation of automated manufacturing

Industry 4.0 derived technologies have the potential to enable a new wave of digital manufacturing solutions for semi and fully automated production. In addition, this paradigm encompasses the use of communication technologies to transmit data to processing stations as well as the utilization of cloud based computational resources for data mining. Despite the rise in automation, future manufacturing systems will initially still require humans in the loop to provide supervisory level mediation for even the most autonomous production scenarios. Through a structured review, this paper details a number of key technologies that are most likely to shape this future and describes a range of scenarios for their use in delivering human mediated automated and autonomous production. This paper argues that in all cases of future manufacturing management it is key that the human has oversight of critical information flows and remains an active participant in the delivery of the next generation of production systems.