Prospective ISO 22400 for the challenges
of human-centered manufacturing
Andrea Bonci*, Sauro Longhi*, Massimiliano Pirani*
* Department of Information Engineering (DII)
Università Politecnica delle Marche, 60131, Ancona, Italy
(e-mail: a.bonci@univpm.it - sauro.longhi@univpm.it - m.pirani@univpm.it)
Abstract: The standard definition of the key performance indicators for the manufacturing operations
management level could not resist the incoming challenges and models of the 4
th
industrial revolution,
which currently relies on the paradigms abiding by the cyber-physical system of systems vision. By
means of a brief survey of the current trends, a set of recommendations are provided in order to open
discussions for the foreseen evolutions of the ISO 22400 standard. A focus is made on the role of the
humans in their increasingly closer collaboration with the pervasive autonomous intelligent entities in the
context of a human-centered manufacturing. It is contended that there is still some room for a review of
the definitions of the performance indicators and their structure that should aim to reflect human and
intelligent automation aspects in an integrated framework. Copyright © 2019 IFAC
Keywords: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), ISO 22400, Complex systems, Decision support systems,
Cybernetics, Fractal systems, Management systems, Manufacturing processes.
1. INTRODUCTION
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
released the ISO 22400 standard in two parts (ISO22400-1
2014, ISO22400-2 2014), and a more recent amendment
(ISO22400-2/Amd1 2017). In the first part the concepts and
the terminology are introduced along with a vision on the
future evolutions of the standard that are currently under
development. The second part defines and describes 34 key
performance indicators (KPIs) and the amendment adds 4
KPIs specific for energy management. The ISO 22400
focuses on performance measures that are at the basis of the
realization of continuous improvement of operational
performance in manufacturing by means of KPIs over various
measurements coming from the operations context. The KPIs
allow the identification of the trends with respect to some
operational objectives determined by the enterprise
management. ISO 22400 describes and defines KPIs at the
level of the manufacturing operations management (MOM),
being it the third level of a hierarchical structure of the
enterprise established by IEC 62264 (IEC62264-1 2003),
otherwise known as ISA 95 (ANSI/ISA 95). The
standardization of the KPIs defined in ISO 22400 for the
MOM is well motivated by the possibility to construct a
shared set of methodologies and tools for the value creation
processes of an enterprise. The objectives and scope of the
ISO 22400 standard are currently under evolution. The first
objective has been to propose a set of KPIs that aims to be
independent and portable across different specific processes.
Future ambitious objectives concern the abstraction of the
KPI structures for exchange purposes (between two MOM
applications or between level 4 of the IEC 62264-1 and the
MOM), and the modelling and the structuring of the causal
dependencies among the KPIs. These achievements are
planned by the ISO 22400 working group with future issues
part 3 and part 4 of the standard (ISO22400-1, 2014).
In this paper, it is contended that the previously mentioned
achievements and the valuable work of the ISO 22400 are at
some risk due to major incoming trends in the factory of the
future context. The paper will mainly focus on analysing the
three trends that, at best of authors’ knowledge, could reduce
the effectiveness of the ISO 22400 architecture in the next
steps towards the factory of the future. The first trend is a
slow but inexorable crumbling of the ISA 95 or IEC 62264-1
hierarchy into a more distributed and granular specification
of the domains and their operational models that should be
more naturally compliant with self-organizing intelligent
automation solutions based on evolving aggregates of
autonomous entities (Leitao et al. 2015, Hermann et al. 2016,
Ribeiro 2017, Ribeiro and Björkman 2017). The second big
trend is one in which the whole business is seen as a living
being, capable of cognition, self-organization, self-regulation
and autonomy (Bonci et al. 2018a, Vahidi et al. 2018).
Nonetheless, the methods based on KPIs can still play a
leading role though with a need for a widened interpretation
and representation. A third trend is the acknowledgement of
the complexity of the processes and the central role of human
beings in their seamless and ergonomic collaboration with
new intelligent automation means. Concerning the role of
human factors in the 4
th
industrial revolution, a relevant topic
is how to measure, on similar and comparable basis, the
performance of humans and machines collaborating to allow
a dynamic switch of the tasks between them. Furthermore
another topic is how to use similar methods and philosophies,
to analyse machines and humans as computational entities for
action and information processing.