Towards gamification of the ramp-up process for Industry 4.0

Keeping personnel motivated and overall company morale high is a crucial aspect of employee satisfaction. In manufacturing, various tasks can be found that can put a strain on personnel, one of them being the so-called ramp-up process. Ramp-up requires human intervention to bring a system to full production, but the process of achieving a successful ramp-up can be very cumbersome and lengthy. As this is usually a trial-and-error approach, spirits can get very low over time if the situation appears to only be slowly improving. For this purpose, gamification is introduced into the ramp-up process for Industry 4.0 to improve the ramp-up experience for operators. This paper offers an overview of the idea, current and future work of a web application for ramp-up that includes the major principles of gamification. The presented work is part of an ongoing student project work undertaken with the Intelligent Automation Centre at Loughborough University.