PERKS-Projekt

The PERKS project has laid the foundation for digital support of industrial companies in the creation, utilization, and management of procedural knowledge. PERKS, as a digital solution, uses artificial intelligence to better manage know-how—that is, skills, information, and experience—related to industrial processes. The project began only a few months ago and includes a consortium of technical partners (Cefriel, DFKI, NTT Data, Onlim, Vienna University of Economics and Business) as well as industrial users (BEKO Europe, Fagor Automation, and Siemens).

In the early months of the project, extensive discussions and workshops among the partners led to a range of business and technical requirements. These form the foundation for numerous company scenarios beyond the project’s original scope, as confirmed by an initial market analysis conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC). The planned solution will represent procedural knowledge in a format that can be easily used by AI applications to support various stakeholders in managing, executing, reviewing, and validating processes both in defining procedures and in their practical application.

“Guided by these requirements, we have built the foundation of PERKS around three main pillars,” says technical project lead Mario Scrocca from Cefriel. Indeed, the PERKS solution includes:

1. a set of multimodal tools to capture knowledge from domain experts or extract it from existing documents;

2. a procedural knowledge management component to integrate and transform this knowledge into a machine-readable format within a knowledge graph;

3. a series of user applications for various business stakeholders—such as a conversational AI agent that assists factory workers in carrying out a procedure.
   
   Mario Scrocca adds: “The PERKS solution enables a human-in-the-loop process for both validating the extracted procedures and reviewing their execution.”

The PERKS solution is flexible enough to be adapted to any industrial environment where procedural knowledge is used. “To ensure this, we consult with a User Board composed of members from industrial companies outside the PERKS consortium,” says project coordinator Irene Celino from Cefriel. “We will continue to engage with them and other industrial stakeholders by organizing events to gather additional ideas and feedback. The goal is to improve our work and ensure a broad market impact.”

In the next phase, the PERKS project will build upon this foundation and implement a first version of the digital solution, which will be deployed and tested at BEKO Europe, Fagor Automation, and Siemens to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in realizing the PERKS vision.