Requirements for Designing a Cyber-Physical System for Competence Development

The increasing demand for individual products and shorter product life cycles leads to changing requirements concerning skills and competences of workers. Competence development during value adding processes becomes a key success criterion. In the future, new methods and procedures for education and advanced training of workers will be needed in order to handle the increasing complexity of individualized and personalized products economically. New systems for the competence development during the value adding process are required in order to achieve an economical production of individual products in an assembly system. The technology enablers for the competence development will be new communication technologies. These technologies lead to cyber-physical systems for competence development, which support the workers and enable them to produce products economically at lot size 1. For an optimal design of these systems the competence development process and the competence measurement need to be included. Competence development, competence measurement and cyber-physical systems are therefore directly linked to each other and depend on each other. For designing a cyber-physical system for competence development of assembly workers in an assembly system, these interconnections will be illustrated in order to enable an economically well-founded view.