Human resource optimisation through semantically enriched data

The industrial domain is experiencing a so-called fourth industrial revolution in which the evergrowing complexity of manufacturing information, the increasing amount of knowledge and the use of web-oriented techniques, represent three crucial factors that are accelerating the growth of complexity of industrial systems. On the other hand, continuous-evolving requirements in industrial environments, due to technology outbreaks and a new global marketplace, have led to an on-going evolution of human resource management through the creation and adoption of alternative business models. In the past decade, semantic models such as ontologies have been proven to be effective for many knowledge-intensive applications, since they provide formal models of domain knowledge that can be exploited in different ways. For all these reasons, an innovative human resource optimisation (HRO) engine is introduced, which employs semantically enhanced information and conditional random field (CRFs) probabilistic models with knowledge derived from industrial shop floor level, and proposes the right person for the right job in real-time shop floor operations towards optimising decisions on how to implement and schedule either repeatedly or non-occurring tasks. Industrial information data flow and semantic enrichment were ensured through the combined use of a common interface data exchange model (CIDEM) and ontologies, after which a feasibility study at a chemical plant presented interesting preliminary results.