Today AI is considered as a valuable ally for humans, able to expand their capacities in the new digital era and improve their cognition. Moreover, explainable AI will play a pivotal role in making machine decisions and behaviours rational to humans, to drive them to the correct decisions, so that the optimal performance is reached.
XMANAI and its technological platform can clearly contribute to the research activities of Europe for advancing AI in manufacturing, focusing on the definition of novel explainable AI models and algorithms that will transform AI from a black-box intruder to a friendly ally and collaborator of business experts, fostering a collaboration mentality that will eventually pay off in better products and services, cost reductions, productivity growth and more wise resource utilisation.
XMANAI will mainly contribute to the following strategic impacts.
Products and services usable in a wide range of manufacturing processes leading to agile production processes and improved quality of products and processes.
Nowadays, manufacturers are pushed to embrace AI and machine learning techniques to support several processes in manufacturing systems, especially in those processes that required complex decision making processes and a vast amount of background knowledge and that have been purely performed by humans so far. Nevertheless, when it comes to such operations, where human rationale plays a very important, and in most cases the decisive role, it is very hard for AI models and similar algorithms to be trusted.
XMANAI aspires to respond to these shortcomings, by providing a trustworthy and reliable infrastructure that will allow manufacturers to better and more efficiently integrate AI, machine learning and data analytics in processes which are not considered appropriate for those at the moment. The main aim is to improve and give birth to new products and services, accelerate production cycles, improve quality of products and operations and eventually transform traditional production systems to data-driven manufacturing systems of high agility becoming part of a larger ecosystem where collaboration is key and new value chains can be developed, based on trustworthy data and intelligence sharing.
Humans working together with Artificial Intelligence systems in optimal complementarity
AI in manufacturing support human in taking more informed decisions by offering the necessary tools and methods to explore numerous possibilities and recommend actions. AI and machine learning can derive more objective results, and given the proper configuration, safeguard ethics, which might in specific cases be neglected by humans in their decisions, either purposely or even by mistake. XMANAI aims to put AI next to humans so that both sides can provide benefits to each other, and perform their tasks in complete complementarity without cultivating the perception in humans that they lose control or that they are threatened by the AI models.
XMANAI starts with the core objective to make AI models explainable and to provide business experts with graph machine learning analytics that are easier to understand and to work with. These tools can therefore become trusted companions to business experts and decision makers in their everyday tasks, explaining why certain results have been suggested, under which conditions, the inputs and assumptions that were considered, all this in an understandable way.
At the same time XMANAI offers the tools for humans to optimise existing models and algorithms, making them more applicable and interpretable. XMANAI concepts and components will be offered through the XMANAI Platform, that will strengthen humans and AI collaboration and contribute to a better productivity, quality and efficiency of the manufacturing system.
