Individual and dyamic workerinformation

In today's turbulent market environment, manufacturing firms face fierce global competition. Many firms react by offering mass customized products or even order-based production. Hence, a adaptive production system, with employees playing a central role, is rendered indispensable. Employees have a high degree of mobility and flexibility for the execution of assembly work, as well as the ability to adapt to new tasks and situations. At the same time, employees are challenged to meet high quality and productivity goals.

In this context, worker information systems can provide support and enable high-variance manual assembly. Through interpreta-tion of the information presented, the workers are enabled to generate the required knowledge for fulfilling the assembly task. Apart from the evident necessity of worker information systems, an advancement towards dynam-ic and individual information systems is likely to increase efficiency when informing workers about their tasks, and to reduce rework or assembly er-rors - by for instance encompassing increased awareness of product changes, or information tailored for the individual worker.

The developed concepts will be implemented and evaluated at the MAN Truck & Bus AG. We are very grateful for MANs support of this research project.

project duration: 12/2015 – 11/2019