In modern industrial systems, collected textual data accumulates over time, offering an important source of information for enhancing present and future industrial practices. Although many AI-based solutions have been developed in the literature for a domain-specific information retrieval (IR) from this data, the explainability of these systems was rarely investigated in such domain-specific environments. In addition to considering the domain requirements within an explainable intelligent IR, transferring the explainable IR algorithm to other domains remains an open-ended challenge. This is due to the high costs, which are associated with intensive customization and required knowledge modelling, when developing new explainable solutions for each industrial domain. In this article, we present a transferable framework for generating domain-specific explanations for intelligent IR systems. The aim of our work is to provide a comprehensive approach for constructing explainable IR and recommendation algorithms, which are capable of adopting to domain requirements and are usable in multiple domains at the same time. Our method utilizes knowledge graphs (KG) for modeling the domain knowledge. The KG provides a solid foundation for developing intelligent IR solutions. Utilizing the same KG, we develop graph-based components for generating textual and visual explanations of the retrieved information, taking into account the domain requirements and supporting the transferability to other domain-specific environments, through the structured approach. The use of the KG resulted in minimum-to-zero adjustments when creating explanations for multiple intelligent IR algorithms in multiple domains. We test our method within two different use cases, a semiconductor manufacturing centered use case and a job-to-applicant matching one. Our quantitative results show a high capability of our approach to generate high-level explanations for the end users. In addition, the developed explanation components were highly adaptable to both industrial domains without sacrificing the overall accuracy of the intelligent IR algorithm. Furthermore, a qualitative user-study was conducted. We recorded a high level of acceptance from the users, who reported an enhanced overall experience with the explainable IR system.

In today’s competitive business world, being aware of customer needs and market-oriented production is a key success factor for industries. To this aim, the use of efficient analytical algorithms ensures better understanding of customer feedback and improves the next generation of products. Accordingly, the dramatic increase in the use of social media in daily life provides beneficial sources for market analytics. Yet how traditional analytic algorithms and methods can be scaled up for such disparate and multistructured data sources is a major challenge. This paper presents and discusses the technological and scientific focus of SoMABiT as a social media analysis platform using big data technology. Sentiment analysis has been employed in order to discover knowledge from social media. The use of MapReduce and the development of a distributed algorithm towards an integrated platform that can scale for any data volume and provide social media-driven knowledge is the main novelty of the proposed concept in comparison to the state-of-the-art technologies.

A smart city is a modern and visionary approach for a city to provide intelligent and smart urban services by using information and communication technologies (ICT). The Internet of Things (IoT), emerging through intelligent networking and sensing technologies, is seen as the data-driven enabler for smart cities with current and future infrastructures. The Open Data Aarhus datasets have been created from sensor data in the city Aarhus in Denmark. This paper presents how big data technologies in the context of smart cities are used to implement a framework with a prototype R Shiny application to analyze road traffic and pollution data to make a step towards smart mobility. The main objective of the approach is the calculation and visualization of the least polluted route from a chosen start to an end point by applying an algorithm utilizing the MapReduce framework running on a Hadoop cluster.

Knowledge integration is well explained by the human–organization–technology (HOT) approach known from knowledge management. This approach contains the horizontal and vertical interaction and communication between employees, human-to-machine, but also machine-to-machine. Different organizational structures and processes are supported with the help of appropriate technologies and suitable data processing and integration techniques. In a Smart Factory, manufacturing systems act largely autonomously on the basis of continuously collected data. The technical design concerns the networking of machines, their connectivity and the interaction between human and machine as well as machine-to-machine. Within a Smart Factory, machines can be considered as intelligent manufacturing systems. Such manufacturing systems can autonomously adapt to events through the ability to intelligently analyze data and act as adaptive manufacturing systems that consider changes in production, the supply chain and customer requirements. Inter-connected physical devices, sensors, actuators, and controllers form the building block of the Smart Factory, which is called the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT uses different data processing solutions, such as cloud computing, fog computing, or edge computing, to fuse and process data. This is accomplished in an integrated and cross-device manner.

The implementation of Industry 4.0 and smart factory concepts changes the ways of manufacturing and production and requires the combination and interaction of different technologies and systems. The need for rapid implementation is steadily increasing as customers demand individualized products which are only possible if the production unit is smart and flexible. However, an existing factory cannot be transformed easily into a smart factory, especially not during operational mode. Therefore, designers and engineers require solutions which help to simulate the aspired change beforehand, thus running realistic pre-tests without disturbing operations and production. New product lines may also be tested beforehand. Data and the deduced knowledge are key factors of the said transformation. One idea for simulation is applying artificial intelligence, in this case the method of multi-agent-systems (MAS), to simulate the inter-dependencies of different production units based on individually configured orders. Once the smart factory is running additional machine learning methods for feedback data of the different machine units may be applied for generating knowledge for improvement of processes and decision making. This paper describes the necessary interaction of manufacturing and knowledge-based solutions before showing an MAS use case implementation of a production line using Anylogic.