Ergonomic Design of Future Production Systems

Increasing global competition and the resulting cost pressures call for premium-quality products and highly effective manufacturing processes. Moreover, in the face of short product life cycles and customers’ demand for variety, markets demand flexible adaptation to changing conditions. In order to stay competitive, it is crucial for companies in high-wage countries to anticipate customer-specific needs, individualize their processes and react extremely flexibly. Therefore, innovative production systems are required that are able to adapt continuously to changing product structures and the corresponding production and assembly processes [1]. One approach to achieving a higher degree of adaptability is to design flexible automated production systems. The competitive advantage is thus improved, giving manufacturers the ability to allocate functions dynamically and to make human-machine interaction more effective. The Cluster of Excellence “Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” focuses on this approach and incorporates key technologies by combining expertise from the fields of production engineering, material sciences and human factors to provide science-based solutions. The aim is to develop the fundamentals of a sustainable production strategy as well as to build methods and models that help us understand, predict and control the behaviour of complex, socio-technical production systems [1]. However, especially in high-wage countries, the level of automation in complex, socio-technical production systems has already been taken so far that, according to some kind of “law of diminishing returns”, a further increase will not lead to a significant increase in productivity. As a result, the number of process errors is significantly reduced by automation but the severity of the potential consequences of a single error increases disproportionately. Therefore, human decisions and actions when planning, monitoring, and optimizing complex production processes will also be crucial in the future [2]. In fact, increasing technological complexity in future production systems will often require intensified human intervention, especially for ramp-up, supervisory control and reconfiguration. Hence, future production systems should focus on integrating the human operator and his or her extraordinary problem-solving abilities, creativity, and sensorimotor skills. This special issue on the ergonomic design of future production systems contains five selected contributions that were part of a special session during the 5th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE) held in July 2014 in Kraków, Poland. The special issue focuses on innovative methods for designing future production systems and gives the reader a concise overview of recent work in the field. Kuz, Bützler and Schlick have analysed the research question of how anthropomorphism in the motion behaviour of a gantry robot in self-optimizing assembly systems affects the predictability of target positions during placement tasks. To investigate this question, they developed a simulation consisting of a robotized assembly cell, which they used to conduct a laboratory study. The virtual gantry robot was