Designing usable interfaces for the Industry 4.0

In Industry 4.0, Human Machine Interfaces are largely used in order to increase the performances of production processes at the same time reducing the number of emergencies and accidents. In manufacturing, the most typical system used to monitor the production is the Andon. It is a graphical system exploited in plants to notify operators who deal with management, maintenance and production performance of the presence of a problem. Of course, the usability of such interfaces is essential to allow an operator to identify and react more effectively to potentially critical situations. Improving the usability of such interfaces is a big challenge due to the increasing complexity of the data that must be processed and understood quickly by operators. In this paper, we present a set of guidelines to help professional developers to design usable interfaces for monitoring industrial production in manufacturing. Such guidelines are based on usability principles and formalized by reviewing existing industrial interfaces. Using a realistic case study prepared with manufacturing experts, we propose an Andon interface that we developed to test the efficacy of these guidelines on a last generation touch-wall device.