Perspectives, Application Gaps, and Involvement of Citizen Developers in Digital Factory Management

Digital systems offer a wide range of factory management applications, ranging from operations, quality, and asset management to scheduling. All these applications require large amounts of domain knowledge and are often highly individualized for each factory or company. Thus, implementation often lies in the hands of manufacturing engineers and needs to be integrated into their training. Low-code platforms and citizen developers depict a new and interesting way to implement digital systems in these areas: Domain experts with limited knowledge in software development can build apps through a graphical user interface, with only drag-and-drop and little program code of its own. On the other hand, several questions remain to be answered before such systems can be helpful for a larger audience in factory management. This contribution thus researches current trends for Citizen Developers and factory management and provides examples of promising applications, from the simplest to the most complex, used in both academic training at a learning factory of the TH Cologne as well as current research projects. Based on these examples, a two-fold survey is presented targeting the prospects and needs of actual citizen developers in manufacturing, the views of managers in this domain, and finally the implications for future training and education in learning factories.