Manulearning: A knowledge-based system to enable the continuous training of workers in the manufacturing field

The Teaching Factory is an emerging paradigm aiming to enforce skills and competencies of engineers and operators working in the field of manufacturing, through an alignment of the teaching and training activities to the needs of modern factories. In this research work, the Teaching Factory principles are applied to envision ManuLearning, a new interactive and explorative knowledge-based system, which aims at enhancing the workforce skills and competencies within the context of Industry 4.0, while developing an awareness campaign to newest technologies among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). This paper presents this envisioned system by mainly focusing on two key-aspects: (i) the elicitation of its major requirements; (ii) the design of the architecture, which highlights how to concretize the realization of a communication channel between the factory and education systems. Finally, a real case study is introduced in order to demonstrate the correctness and validity of the proposed system.