Enhancing the Workforce Skills and Competences by Leveraging a Human-Centered Knowledge-Based System in the Rise of Industry 4.0

One of the significant challenges of Industry 4.0 is the realization of a more sustainable manufacturing along the whole factory life-cycle, which has an impact on three different dimensions: economical, environmental, and social. Whereas the economic and environmental dimensions have been widely discussed in many research works and progressively integrated in production processes, there is still a shortage of studies aiming at incorporating the social dimension. Consequently, economic planning and policies lack the full acknowledgment of human rights, education, health and gender diversity. With this study, we aim at aligning the technological panorama of Industry 4.0 with the social dimension of sustainable manufacturing. This alignment is realized through a knowledge-based system able to represent, formally, both human factor and the principal aspects of the value creation chain inside the factory, thus promoting a human-centric workplace improving the social sustainability in manufacturing by not penalizing productivity. This work is an extended version of a previous work by authors, focusing on the description of the design and implementation details of the knowledge layer underpinning the whole system. Furthermore, a case study is presented, in which factory environments try to meet workers capabilities and desiderata, by augmenting the quality of life and ensuring people health, while ensuring productivity. Finally, since the research proposed in this article is a case study research, a well known methodology and related guidelines are exploited in order to study, analyze, evaluate and report the case.