A learning factory approach on machine learning in production companies: How a learning factory approach can help to increase the understanding of the application of machine learning on production planning and control tasks

Technological progress and increasing digitalization offer many opportunities to production companies, but also continually present them with new challenges. The automation of processes is progressing in manufacturing areas and technical support systems, such as human-robot collaboration, are leading to significant changes in workflows. However, in other areas of companies large parts of the work are still done by humans. This is partly the case with the use of production data. Although much data is already collected and sorted automatically, the final evaluation of this data and especially decision-making is often done by humans. In particular, this is the case for decisions that cannot clearly be made based on conditional programming.
The use of machine learning (ML) represents a promising approach to make such complex decisions automatically. A sharp increase in scientific publications in the recent years demonstrates the trend that more and more companies and institutions are looking into the use of machine learning in production. Since ML is beeing applied across several industries, the resulting massive shortage of skilled workers in the field of ML has to be addressed in short and medium terms by training and educating existing employees in production companies.