Developing a decision support system (DSS) for a dental manufacturing production line based on data mining

In this study, an Industry 4.0 framework-based decision support system (DSS) was developed using a combination of wireless network and RFID identification technology to manage a production line in a traditional dental manufacturing lab. The motivation was to prevent mistakes from manual recording, to remotely monitor the working hours of employees in manufacturing processes via internet, and to evaluate the rationality of the employee’s working hours. In the DSS, four network nodes were established to track four important manufacturing processes of digital dentistry. In each of these processes, the time spent by the dental technician was recorded by scanning their ID cards. All information was simultaneously uploaded to a databank in the cloud and analyzed by the computer software MATLAB. These programs evaluated the rationality of employees’ working hours in each of the monitored processes, which can help managers to follow up or improve the process efficiency.