Information assistance for smart assembly stations

Information assistance helps in many application domains to structure, guide and control human work processes. However, it lacks a formalisation and automated processing of background knowledge which vice versa is required to provide ad-hoc assistance. In this paper, we describe our conceptual and technical work to include contextual background knowledge in raising awareness, guiding, and monitoring the assembly worker. We present cognitive architectures as missing link between highly sophisticated manufacturing data systems and implicitly available contextual knowledge on work procedures and concepts of the work domain. Our work is illustrated with examples in SWI-Prolog and the Soar cognitive architecture.