Engineering insights from an anthropocentric cyber-physical system: A case study for an assembly station

Abstract To effectively cope with the complexity of manufacturing control problems the cyber-physical systems are engineered to work in the social space. Therefore the research in the field of cyber-physical systems needs to address social aspects when this concept is adopted in factory automation. The paper argues for an anthropocentric cyber-physical reference model as the basic decomposition unit for the design of distributed manufacturing control systems. The model assimilates all the required components (i.e. physical, computational and human) of a synthetic hybrid system in an integrated way. This is due to the real need to design cyber-physical production systems where the technological advances are merging their functionalities in a way more and more difficult to distinctly draw between the physical, computational and human components. If this view is almost obvious for advanced technologies, such as brain computer interfaces, controlled assistive robots and intelligent prostheses, it is equally true even for simple automated systems, like context-aware assistive systems that are built with state-of-the-art technologies. This assertion is demonstrated in the context of the SmartFactory KL production system, where the manual assembly station exhibits all the key features of an anthropocentric cyber-physical system by employing a seamless augmented reality to guide the human operator.