Development of a Neuro-Fuzzy System for Assessing Information Management on the Shop Floor

Abstract

Communication problems are directly or indirectly related to the causes of industrial accidents. This may be associated with problems in information management at the operational level. Before evaluating information management on the shop floor, a documentary analysis was carried out in this study to identify problems in the communication among the causes of 5 accidents in the oil sector in Brazil. After documentary analysis, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) was developed to assess information management on the shop floor. A case study was developed with a sample of 120 respondents through the application of a survey. Managers, supervisors, and operators from a land-based oil production region participated in this study. The documentary analysis identified communication problems in 53% of the reports. The neuro-fuzzy model performed well, with the root mean square error (RMSE) being 0.229 in training and 0.296 in data verification. The results suggest that the ANFIS method can be successfully applied to establish a model of analysis of information management on the shop floor.

Keywords

• ANFIS
• information management
• internal communication
• organizational communication
• shop floor communication