The Human Collaboration Environment (HCE) component provides collaboration facilities to enhance teamwork by offering user-user, user-developer, and developer-developer interaction using multiple communication channels enabling diverse ways of collaboration. The HCE also aims to ease the relationship between human users and manufacturing assets by providing holistic information and usage description in digital format. The collaboration environment may also include external developers and users who can request services and use communications platforms such as audio and video streaming, forums, workshops, and solutions to support hackathons.

All these collaboration functionalities are available to users through a web application suite and the communications facilities using messages, files exchange, videoconferences and tasks tracking are available on a mobile application.

Benefits 

• Sustains interaction between industry users and zApps developers with the Question-Answer web module

• Allows users to start discussions, request for new applications, share images and videos, upload data files, use online tools

• Code collaboration – Human Collaboration web module that sustains interaction between external developers of zApps and internal developers of i4FS components

• Online face-to-face interaction (video calls, screen share, chat, polls) between users from industry and zApps developers and between zApps developers (external developers)

• Allows users to share eLearning materials like presentations, technical documentation, manuals, videos, and useful links for external developers (Virtual academy)

Features

The features for this component are enumerated below and explained thereafter:

• Forums on QA platform

• Code collaboration

• Video calls, webinars, hackathons

• Virtual academy