Nevertheless, AI is on the factory floor. For instance, take a look at Omron optical discrete sensors for detecting and staging the sequence of objects in manufacturing.
These days, the focus is on agent-based operations on the factory floor. One term for this is prognostics: "the ability to predict and prevent possible fault or system degradation before failures occur," rather than the current method of scheduled maintenance and reactive maintenance based on the "fail and fix approach," explains Jay Lee, director of the National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS; www.imscenter.net) and professor at University of Cincinnati.
AI can still help fill the gap in the skills and knowledge that are increasingly lacking on the factory floor as the number of equipment operators drops and more manufacturing engineers leave the field through attrition.
AI in control: artificial intelligence, expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural nets, and rules-based algorithms for factory control. Although the buzz is quieted, all of it is still around. You just don't notice it
As these different workers confronted each other on the factory floor, they occasionally met with each other and traded personal and social affronts and insults.
The respectable manhood of the postwar era rested on the gradual consolidation of the civilized relationship between corporations and unions and the patriarchal exclusion of women from auto work and the racial separation of black men on the factory floor. (20)
Practical jokes and horseplay (23) frequently resulted in angry altercations between men on the factory floor. These boylike pranks often helped to alleviate the tedium and monotony of assembly-line work, but occasionally they got out of hand and turned uncontrollably violent.
Rough manhood: the aggressive and confrontational shop culture of U.S. auto workers during World War II
Management had to understand what was happening
on the factory floor. Thus, the starting point of scientific management, according to Taylor, was "the deliberate gathering in on the part of those on the management's side of all of the great mass of traditional knowledge, which in the past has been in the heads of the workmen, and in the physical skill and knack of the workmen, which he has acquired through years of experience." Through his notorious time studies and his less well-known metal-cutting experiments, Taylor allowed those who ran the business to pierce the veil of shop practice secrecy.
The man with the plan