Guideline for operating resilient and flexible production facilities using runtime risk management

Description

The topics of risk management and safety in production are becoming an increasing challenge for companies in the interconnected and digitalized Industry 4.0 age. The reasons for this include changing market requirements, turbulence in supply chains and stricter energy efficiency requirements due to sustainability. These aspects lead to the use of resilient and flexible production systems, which contradicts the use of traditional and static safety concepts. Another reason is the demographic change, with the difficulty of finding skilled workers, for example for conducting manual risk assessments.These dynamic boundary conditions no longer permit static and manual risk management with a smaller operating team. Therefore, in this paper a new safety paradigm is proposed: a dynamic, adaptable safety that reacts to the current context and environmental situation. This operational safety intelligence brings together flexible production and safety, handles data from large distributed systems in the appropriate context, understands risks from dynamic processes and optimizes operations by runtime risk management as well as predictive modeling.The core building block of this novel operational safety intelligence is a cutting-edge information management system that can handle contextualized information and ensure data integrity. This is achieved by use of the Semantic Web concept, based on knowledge graphs with unified semantics and enhanced with deduction and constraints checking abilities. By bringing together these systems, and appropriate use of artificial intelligence (AI), operational safety intelligence is becoming an essential methodology for guaranteeing safety in Industry 4.0.