Part manufacturing under reduced workforce restrictions

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jan C. Aurich; Professor Dr. Achim Ebert
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 505568854

One of the central elements of industrial production is the manufacturing of finished parts from raw material. Even in highly automated scenarios, the part manufacturing processes (e.g., milling) still require human interaction. Human operators are needed on-site to ensure continuous operation and part quality, e.g., by setup or maintenance tasks. Due to this dependency, part manufacturing is highly susceptible to reduced workforce situations as they occur, e.g., during pandemics like the current COVID-19 outbreak. New modes of telework collaboration based on interactive systems that comprise visualization and communication technologies, collaborative robots, fast internet connections and remote control of machine tools bear potential to overcome these challenges. In consequence, the proposed project investigates how such modes and systems need to be designed to share the respective tasks between teleworking and on-site employees. As the interactions and systems show a high complexity due to the characteristics of the tasks (e.g. operational, user-related and organizational aspects) and since reduced workforce situations often occur suddenly, a high degree of usability must be ensured to enable quick ramp-up and reliable operation. Therefore, an interdisciplinary approach between manufacturing engineering, ergonomics/human factors and human-computer interaction investigates how the concept of Human-centered Design (HCD) needs to be adapted to ensure this usability while considering the interdisciplinary character of manufacturing tasks. After describing exemplary and diversified use case scenarios with varying degrees of automation and different manufacturing task characteristics, the user context will be specified, and requirements will be identified. Afterwards, design solutions for the systems and collaboration modes are developed and evaluated iteratively. Finally, the findings are generalized to form a framework that provides guidelines for manufacturers to partially relocate on-site manufacturing tasks to telework in reduced workforce situations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partners: Privatdozentin Dr. Margit Pohl; Professor Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Schlund