Serious gaming supporting competence development in sustainable manufacturing

Becoming a sustainable global manufacturing enterprise is a challenge for almost every manufacturing organization in the world because of its multidimensional nature. Sustainability combines environmental, economic, and social dimensions and is considered to be a complex and hard to learn subject needing a lot of experience and competences. Traditional ways to create such experience and develop competences like role playing and simulations tend to take a lot of time and are expensive. On the other hand, serious gaming has proven to support learners in acquiring new and complex knowledge and is ideally suited to support problem based learning by creating engaging experiences around a contextual problem where users must apply competences to solve these presented challenges. This chapter introduces a new learning environment which is build around a gaming engine supporting the development of competences in specific subject areas. Selected competences in sustainable global manufacturing lead to the definition of scenarios, which then can be executed by a game engine, thus creating experience within the user. A knowledge ecology space allows the user to interact and reflect on learning outcomes with other participants. The subject of sustainable global manufacturing is the application case presented in this chapter showing how specific competences in this area have been identified and how a game scenario has been developed. Finally, its implementation and evaluation is discussed

The coming revolution in competence development: using serious games to improve cross-cultural skills

Approaches to competence development have tended to focus on training to reach a required level of performance in simple and reproducible contexts, rather than in the more complex and hard-to-replicate contexts that characterize real-world projects, especially projects that involve people from other cultures. This paper explores how the Serious Games approach can be exploited to create skills in dealing with cross-cultural issues in project management. The degree of difference this can make to real-world performance is so dramatic that managers who have experienced it are seeing it not as a way to add Incremental Improvements to TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) but as more of a Radical Innovation – a revolutionary change. Some of the main skills required in project management are reviewed, and different models of cross-cultural analysis applied to understand how the challenges of managing projects are increased by cultural issues. Our testbed for this is an EU project TARGET that is developing the next generation TEL approach. We describe its approach and look at how the TARGET serious game can be designed to achieve enhanced cross-cultural skills in users

Contributo metodológico para a tomada de decisão em projecto sustentável – uma abordagem axiomática

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia MecânicaTradicionalmente, a tomada de decisão em projecto de engenharia assenta sobre os aspectos da funcionalidade, no sentido de dar resposta às necessidades da sociedade. Como em engenharia não há respostas únicas, a selecção das propostas de solução é usualmente condicionada pelos aspectos económicos, os quais são normalmente tomados como restrição na tomada de decisão técnica. Na fase final do século XX, a comunidade internacional começou a tomar consciência da necessidade de actuar sobre a constante agressão às condições naturais do planeta. Neste contexto, começaram a ser consideradas preocupações de ordem ambiental e, consequentemente, a ser incluídas no projecto, todavia, também, como restrições. Assim, surgiu um conceito de projecto mais alargado – o projecto sustentável –, assente em três vertentes: sociedade, economia e ambiente. Na acepção da Teoria Axiomática de Projecto, é fácil de admitir que os projectos sustentáveis sejam acoplados, o que pressupõe a optimização das soluções. A tese desenvolvida assenta nos pressupostos: os aspectos económicos e ambientais devem ser lidados como requisitos e não como restrições, particularmente, nas tomadas de decisão da fase conceptual do projecto de propostas de solução; os valores dos parâmetros de projecto utilizados para a definição da solução conceptual devem obedecer inicialmente à funcionalidade e adequarem-se simultaneamente aos requisitos económicos e ambientais. Assim, a metodologia proposta nesta dissertação conduz ao encontro de “zonas” flexíveis de compatibilidade de requisitos de natureza diferente, com vista a disponibilizar informação para a tomada de decisão na fase conceptual. Foram trabalhados três casos exemplificativos simples, de desenvolvimento de produto com vista à definição das características dos mesmos, nomeadamente, produto de cortiça com borracha, reservatórios pressurizados e estrutura tubular do tipo galeria. Os resultados mostram que a metodologia proposta se mostra adequada, porém muito dependente da existência e da fiabilidade dos dados

Human in the Data-Driven Zero Defect Manufacturing Loop: Case Examples from Manufacturing Companies

Data-driven Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) system gathers and organizes data from different sources, integrating and analyzing the data using different tools, with the purpose to react on potential quality issues before they happen with adequate levels of data accuracy and precision. This paper discusses the role of humans in the data driven ZDM loop, considering the context of four manufacturing companies, from the EU H2020 project DAT4Zero which has also funded this study. These companies represent distinct manufacturing environments, each with specific industrial challenges and requirements, which were studied to map, analyze, and exemplify the potential role of humans in the data driven ZDM framework in real manufacturing environments.acceptedVersio

Designing a Privacy Dashboard for a Smart Manufacturing Environment

In smart manufacturing environments sensors are collecting data about work processes. This data likely also contains references to actions of a single worker, which can be considered personal data. Privacy dashboards convey information on what personal data is stored by a system and provide means for users of a system to control what personal data is shared according to their needs. Dashboards put the control over their personal data in the hands of the users. However, to act as a trust building component the dashboard needs to convey or mediate the trade-off between the user's privacy and the benefits of data sharing. This work describes the design process and a elicitation of preliminary requirements for a privacy dashboard that is developed in the context of the the H2020 project HUMAN Manufacturing.acceptedVersio

Requirements for adopting digital B2B platforms for manufacturing capacity finding and sharing

This paper discusses the requirements of companies for adopting emerging digital Business-to-Business (B2B) platforms for manufacturing capacity finding and sharing. The requirements of the companies were identified through interviews with 34 companies from 5 countries in Europe, majority of them being manufacturers across different sectors. The study aims to contribute to wider adoption of such platforms among real life companies

A Framework to Navigate the Privacy Trade-offs for Human-Centred Manufacturing

New technological advances can offer personalised and timely services for industry workers. Exoskeletons, HoloLens, Process Mining and Social Knowledge Networks are some of these services offered to workers by the EU HuMan project. These services could alleviate a worker’s physical stress, their cognitive load or provide help based on the knowledge and experiences of their peers. The successful application of several such services depends on the availability of data about a worker’s state, including their performance. This paper focusses on the design of cognitive systems that provide personalised services while respecting a worker’s privacy and the needs of an organisation. We present a framework for supporting privacy by design and the risks, threats and needs of users, organisations and developers.acceptedVersio

Rapid Competence Development in Serious Games Using Case-Based Reasoning and Threshold Concepts

Conference paperA major challenge in todays fast pace world is the acquisition of competence in a timely and efficient manner, whilst keeping the individual highly motivated. This paper presents a novel based on the use of serious games driven by Case Based Reasoning (CBR) tailored by Threshold Concepts (TC) to present the learner with the most efficient choice of game scenarios to address their present competence gap. This allows the learner to maximise their time in competence development. This is current work - in - progress