Preparing Production Systems for the Internet of Things - The Potential of Socio-Technical Approaches in Dealing with Complexity

The Internet of Things will influence how production systems of the future will work. An expected change is the increase in complexity when production system will start communicating with each other. This complexity can be managed by applying socio-technical approaches. This includes analyzing a production system regarding the domains: tasks, actors, technology, and structure. We identified three topics per domain that we think need further investigation, as they may influence complexity to a strong degree. For tasks we suggest looking into urgency, habituation, and strategies; for actors we suggest looking into skills, human factors, and user diversity. In the field of technology we find visualization, decision support, and interactions to be most pressing, while in the field of structure we see responsibility, delegation, and communication.