Welcome to COALA Newsletter June 2021
Dear reader,
I am delighted to introduce this first edition of the COALA newsletter. COALA – COgnitive Assisted agile manufacturing for a LAbor force supported by trustworthy Artificial Intelligence – is an EU Horizon 2020 funded project, which aims to develop a trustworthy voice-enabled Digital Intelligent Assistant for the manufacturing industry.
We intend to make this newsletter a regular publication and to use it to keep you in touch with news and developments related to the COALA project and its progress. In this and future editions, we shall be reporting our progress in the technological implementation of COALA solution in different business cases as well as any upcoming activities and events.
We hope that you will find our newsletter interesting and useful.
Enjoy reading our newsletter!
Karl Hribernik
Project Coordinator
BIBA – Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH
SOLUTION
A Trustworthy Voice-Enabled Digital Assistant for the Manufacturing Industry
© Stefan Wellsandt – BIBA
The COALA vision for AI in manufacturing is the development of human-centred Digital Intelligent Assistant that provides a more proactive and pragmatic approach to support operative situations characterized by cognitive load, time pressure, and little or zero tolerance for quality issues.
COALA will help shape the complementarity in the collaboration between the AI-based digital assistant and the human so that:
– The AI will performe time-consuming and stressful tasks reliably and credibly
– The human will focus on understanding and problem-solving in complex and knowledge-intensive situations.
COALA’s AI-focused education and training concept will support the human-side of the collaboration by providing concept for teaching professionals systematically and, in the language of the workers, about the capabilities, risks, and limitations of AI in manufacturing.
We will develop a solution for cognitive assistance consisting of a composition of trustworthy AI components with a voice-enabled digital intelligent assistant as an interface. The solution will support workers that need to use analytics tools and new workers that perform on-the-job training.
We will develop an education and training concept focusing on building blue-collar worker competencies in human-AI collaboration. The COALA solution will transform how workers perform their jobs and allow companies to increase their production process and product quality.
Stefan Wellsandt
Project Coordinator
BIBA – Bremer Institut
für Produktion und Logistik GmbH
INTERVIEW
Human-AI Collaboration in Quality Control of White Goods
The COALA solution will be deployed and validated against three industrial use cases: (1) white goods, (2) textile and (3) detergent productions.
In this newsletter’s edition, we interviewe a project partner from Whirlpool Corporation, Enrica Bosani, Manufacturing R&D Project Manager. The Whirlpool use case is focused on the implementation of the COALA Digital Intelligent Assistant (DIA) to support the activity in the Zero Hour Testing (ZHT) laboratory of the Microwave and Oven (MWO) factory. She shares her views with us on the challenges related to quality control at the ZHT laboratory and potential benefits of implementing the COALA solution.
Enrica Bosani
Manufacturing R&D Project Manager
Whirlpool Corporation
What are the main challenges in the textile and fashion industry?
One of the key challenges in textile and luxury fashion industry is the shortage of qualified labour force that can produce high quality and high value textiles. Besides that, training of new workers can be time consuming and costly for companies. Another challenge is the continuous competition through high quality products.
The current cost of quality of Piacenza concerns
- the quality detection and repair, which is carried out after weaving and at the end of the process, before delivery
- the cost of defects, which results in products delivered to customers and sold at a discount.
To address these challenges, COALA textile use case focusses on two main scenarios.
The first scenario aims to reduce the time and cost of machine operator trainings through support of the Digital Intelligent Assistant (DIA). The workers focused in this scenario are the machine operators, who use their skills and knowledge to prepare and supervise machine operations under strict control of the product quality.
The second scenario, led by Citta Studi, focuses on development of a didactic concept for professional textile workers. COALA’s didactic concept aims to help the new generation of the textil workers developing their competencies in working with AI-based systems, such as the digital assistant.
How will COALA improve your quality performance?
We expect that the COALA Digital Intelligent Assistant (DIA) effectively supports the ZHT operators to execute the quality check on finished products as well as to capture potential quality defects, to be identified by COALA’s predictive analytics function based on the available quality data set and afterwards to suggest the ZHT operators the right actions.
Currently, the ZHT operators execute the quality control based on their own experience and memory, referring to a predefined and statistical quality checklist. When a new product is introduced, a dedicated training has to be setup. For each product to be tested, COALA automatically executes a quality risk assessment on available historical data to provide recommended additional control steps in case of identified high quality risk for a specific defect.
The COALA DIA is expected to replace the current manual digital input of identified defects into the legacy systems or of positive control result by leveraging voice control. The operators can accept or refuse recommendations provided by COALA. In case of refusal, they should provide an explanation. Their feedback should then be used by COALA to improve future recommendations.
Moreover, COALA will support operator’s skills and competencies development by 1) adapting checklist level of details to the current knowledge level of the operator and 2) transferring knowledge of experts to novices.
The COALA solution will allow capturing the operator’s knowledge and experience, making it available to Whirlpool quality organization to boost cross-functional improvement actions (production and product development).
COMMUNITY
Join our community!
COALA aims to actively contribute to the EU AI communities and help build a connected AI community across Europe.
As a first step, a task force for Digital Intelligent Assistants in manufacturing has been setup in the AI4EU Platform. Through this platform, we can exchange information, discuss various aspects, such as ethics, challenges and values-added and create opportunities for exploitation. We would like to take this opportunity to invite you in COALA’s group on the AI4EU Platform.
Moreover, COALA collaborates in the AI-MAN Cluster with other eight projects that are funded under the EU H2020 ICT-38 call – Artificial intelligence for manufacturing. The aim is to identify technologies and development practices for trustworthy human-centred AI in manufacturing.
Other activities involving Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) across Europe are also planned in the future, such as workshops and showcase events to work towards adoption of COALA’s results.
Sign up to our newsletter, stay informed about our activities and follow along as the project evolves.
