Software Sensor for Activity-Time Monitoring and Fault Detection in Production Lines

Industry 4.0-based human-in-the-loop cyber-physical production systems are transforming the industrial workforce to accommodate the ever-increasing variability of production. Real-time operator support and performance monitoring require accurate information on the activities of operators. The problem with tracing hundreds of activity times is critical due to the enormous variability and complexity of products. To handle this problem a software-sensor-based activity-time and performance measurement system is proposed. To ensure a real-time connection between operator performance and varying product complexity, fixture sensors and an indoor positioning system (IPS) were designed and this multi sensor data merged with product-relevant information. The proposed model-based performance monitoring system tracks the recursively estimated parameters of the activity-time estimation model. As the estimation problem can be ill-conditioned and poor raw sensor data can result in unrealistic parameter estimates, constraints were introduced into the parameter-estimation algorithm to increase the robustness of the software sensor. The applicability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated on a well-documented benchmark problem of a wire harness manufacturing process. The fully reproducible and realistic simulation study confirms that the indoor positioning system-based integration of primary sensor signals and product-relevant information can be efficiently utilized in terms of the constrained recursive estimation of the operator activity.