Towards Flexible and Cognitive Production—Addressing the Production Challenges

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors explain the various aspects of an assembly line in order to build a cognitive assembly line. Three sensory devices are used to retrieve the data useful to build a cognitive data-driven approach.

 

The paper is interesting and contains a lot of information but put in a way that the manuscript seems more like an industrial report rather than a scientific paper.

The overall structure of the paper should be carefully checked and revised to better underline what can be found in the literature and what else represents the novelty of the proposed paper.

 

In addition, there are over 100 references in this paper and almost 30 of them (28 to be exact) are self-references of one or more authors of the manuscript. 

Following this, there are entire sections that are pretty much copied and pasted from other works (e.g. lines 184-191 are from [39], entire sentences in 6.2 are from [48], most from line 448 to 467 is from [78], most in 8.2 is from [96], …) and this should be carefully avoided for plagiarism purposes. 

 

When not strictly needed avoid citing visited websites and refer to existing scientific literature. 

The paper is already very long and dense with information and the insertion of non-original pictures (Figs 8,10, 11) should be carefully justified.

 

In general, each section/subsection should clearly state what is original and what it is not.

 

A list of the main comments/doubts/request is as follows:

 

1. Introduction

 

 This is should be structured in terms of what is the goal of the paper and, in this sense, this section lacks some narrativity to help the reader fully appreciate the effort of the authors. At the moment it is a chaotic description of literature, industrial reality, or possible improvement of the case study all mixed together. This makes the reader confused and does not help the narrativity. 

 

In addition, most of the literature review should be placed here to fully develop a comprehensive picture.

Some suggestions of other works that could help enlarge the reference database:

 - cloud computing and machine monitoring in Industry 4.0 (see Bacci di Capaci R. and Scali C. 2020. A cloud-based monitoring system for performance assessment of industrial plants. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 59(6), pp.2341-2352.)

 - chemical plant optimization in the paradigms of industry 4.0 and using IoT sensors and an ad-hoc connections system via TCP   (see Vaccari, M, et al. "Optimally Managing Chemical Plant Operations: An Example Oriented by Industry 4.0 Paradigms." Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 60.21 (2021): 7853-7867., Vaccari, M, et al. "Implementation of an Industry 4.0 system to optimally manage chemical plant operation." IFAC-PapersOnLine 53.2 (2020): 11545-11550., Badii, C., et al. "Industry 4.0 synoptics controlled by iot applications in node-red." 2020 International Conferences on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) and IEEE Congress on Cybermatics (Cybermatics). IEEE, 2020.)

- a vision-based data reader (VDR) for training and testing purposes to fit the requirement of cost consideration and real-time monitoring in edge computing applied to a real plastic injection factory for cutting board production (see Hsu, Tse-Chuan, Yao-Hong Tsai, and Dong-Meau Chang. "The Vision-Based Data Reader in IoT System for Smart Factory." Applied Sciences 12.13 (2022): 6586.)

 

2. Use Case

- There are sentences here that seem taken from spot messages of Wacker Neuson. The authors have to focus on the scientific part of the test case. 

- line 68 typo: portray demonstrate -> choose only one

- line 70 is a truncated sentence

 

3. Research Gap

- Merge with section 2 removing common parts

 

4. Cognitive Entities

- lines 110 and 118 repeat the wording “in this paper” on two different occasions, try to rephrase this mini section to divide what is already in place and what is proposed.

- I would merge sections 5 and 6 into 4, that is 5 -> 4.1 and 6 -> 4.2 in order to define all together the cognitive entities of the study.

 

5. Cognitive Assembly Balancing

-line 134: “we proposed” is referred to the work in [17] and lines 139-142 are still referred to ref [17] like the rest of this section. The conclusion that I formulate is that this section is nothing new but just a summary of what was done in [17] and therefore can be reduced. What am I missing?

 

6. Cognitive and Flexible Shopfloors

- OEM is not defined

- line 184: what does it mean “we divided…”?

- lines 222-224: is it necessary such a degree of detail in a scientific paper?

- lines 232-234: what does it mean? for machine learning (ML) a pre-processing step is almost always needed. In which cases did you not use a pre-processing step? which methods for ML did you use?

-line 243: I find the wording “micro optimization techniques” a bit out of place in this case.

-line 269 is missing a period

-lines 287-289: where are the validation results? which metric did you use to validate your approach? Detail

 

7. Cognitive Data-Driven Approach to Improve Assembly Line

- 7.1 is taken from [64] said at line 353? in this case the author should reduce this section.

-lines 360-364: I do not understand if this is a suggestion to the reader and to do what. Please rephrase

- line 374: this means that the visual analytics used here is the one from [69], right?

- Figure 8 captions is referring to a wrong reference

- line 449: the acronym ML should have been defined much before this line. The authors should check the all text and substitute it.

 

8. Cognitive Communication and Safety on Shop Floors

- figure 10: is it needed? Does not add anything to the paper.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you for your detailed review and consideration. It was very helpful for us to improve the article in all aspects. We have incorporated almost all the comments carefully, and thus, the additional time taken by us. We have also performed a thorough paid English language check to improve it grammatically. 

In the attached document, we have addressed how we resolved every comment/review mentioned by you. 

We thank you for your efforts and patience in guiding us. 

Regards, 

Muaaz Abdul Hadi 

(on behalf of all the authors)

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This review manuscript focuses on revolutionizing the existing Industry 4.0 with an even-intensified human-machine interaction and moving towards "cognitivity". Hence, the implementation of selected cognitive technologies in a case study from Wacker Neuson. The partner company works on the concept of mass customization, but they utilize manual labour for the high-variety assembly stations or lines. Therefore, sensing and guidance devices are used to provide information to the worker and also retrieve and monitor the working, with respecting data privacy policies. The review idea is so good; however, some issues should be addressed according to the following comments:

1) The overall presentation, readability, and some literature statistical graphs are mandatory. Please, correct the language problems, it is weak from the Grammarly and sequences of events, I catch 21 errors by using a personal program, and the authors must cure them carefully. Also, the authors must avoid the use of the pronoun "we & our" in the whole manuscript.

2) The "Abstract" section should be more intensively focused on the main idea directly and must contain the current problems, their remedy, recommendations, and future vision of this review manuscript.

3) Generally, it could be interesting in the introduction section to add a new graph showing the increase in the number of research papers studies concerned with the revolution of Industry 4.0 with an even-intensified human-machine interaction and how to move towards "cognitivity" in the last 10 years, by using the Web of Science database.

4) The introduction section should be enriched using the up-to-date references 2022, by adding and citing papers in the area of the latest trends of applying the IoT and machine learning to several production applications towards Industry 4.0. E.g., Reliable Deep Learning and IoT-Based Monitoring System for Secure Computer Numerical Control Machines & Experimental Setup for Online Fault Diagnosis of Induction Machines via Promising IoT and Machine Learning & Effective IoT-based Deep Learning Platform for Online Fault Diagnosis of Power Transformers & Towards Secured Online Monitoring for Digitalized GIS Against Cyber-Attacks Based on IoT and Machine Learning.

5) Please try to add various equations that describe the Cognitive Assembly Process and their merits rather than the others. In addition, check carefully all the abbreviation definitions, symbols, and standard units in the whole manuscript. I catch some errors and the other symbols are not defined, please define the missed abbreviations.

6) The resolution and quality of figures should be modified; they should be presented as close to the camera-ready format. Also, please don't use the symbol abbreviations on X-Y-axes, they must have the full name with their SI units.

 

7) The conclusion section should be rearranged, and the authors' recommendations should be pointed out. Also, the authors may propose some interesting problems as future work at the end of the conclusion.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you for your review and consideration. It was helpful for us to improve the article overall.  All the comments mentioned by you have been incorporated, and thus, the additional time taken by us. We have also performed a thorough paid English language check to improve it grammatically. 

In the attached document, we have addressed how we resolved every comment/review mentioned by you. 

We thank you for your efforts and patience in guiding us. 

Regards, 

Muaaz Abdul Hadi 

(on behalf of all the authors)

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have critically addressed all of my doubts and questions thus improving the quality of the paper. 

I suggest a minor revision to correct/fix typos and other minor details. Please check the whole manuscript carefully.

A few examples found are:

- line 105: typo "mitigatin"

- line 120:  repetition "the recommender system recommends"

- Fig 4: not readable as it is, enlarge it

- Fig 10: detail in the caption which one is the meshed topology and which one is the star topology (right/left)

Author Response

The authors have critically addressed all of my doubts and questions thus improving the quality of the paper. 

• Thank you for your detailed review, which made the article better. 

I suggest a minor revision to correct/fix typos and other minor details. Please check the whole manuscript carefully.

• We have checked the paper thoroughly and caught a few instances where there was an error in spelling. We have changed it.

A few examples found are:

- line 105: typo "mitigatin"

• Rectified

- line 120:  repetition "the recommender system recommends"

• Rectified

- Fig 4: not readable as it is, enlarge it

• Rectified. The image has been redrawn with a higher resolution.

- Fig 10: detail in the caption which one is the meshed topology and which one is the star topology (right/left)

• Rectified. This has been indicated in the article

Reviewer 2 Report

All of my concerns are adjusted, thanks.

Author Response

• The article was thoroughly spell-checked, and instances with errors were found. This has been rectified. 
• Also, Figure 4 has been replaced with a better resolution to make it easier for the reader.