Essential Individual and Organizational Decision-Making for Smart Manufacturing

Essential skills for worker success in smart manufacturing encompass not only technical skills, but also decision-making skills to be able to interact effectively with machines, software, and other humans. This multidisciplinary project brings together insights from experimental cognitive psychology research and qualitative field research to present a framework that identifies decision-making skills at the individual and organizational system levels for success in smart manufacturing. The cognitive psychology research indicated that human memory should be augmented during training with novel equipment to maximize human performance and retention of information. The field research revealed several essential decision-making factors for workers and organizations. A proposal is presented to apply the research findings for designing a training paradigm for smart manufacturing workers and facilities to be adaptable for a variety of decision-making situations.