Data in Context: How Digital Transformation Can Support Human Reasoning in Cyber-Physical Production Systems

In traditional production plants, current technologies do not provide sufficient context to support information integration and interpretation. Digital transformation have the potential contextualization, but it is unclear how this can be achieved. The present article presents a selection of psychological literature in four areas relevant contextualization: sampling, integration, categorization, causal reasoning. Characteristic biases limitations human processing are discussed. Based on literature, we derive functional requirements for digital technologies, focusing cognitive activities they should support. We then that foster contextualization. These enable modelling system relations, data from different sources, connection situation with historical data. illustrate these contextual reasoning, highlight challenges addressed when designing human–machine cooperation cyber-physical systems.