The Role of Maintenance Operator in Industrial Manufacturing Systems: Research Topics and Trends

Maintenance contributes to gaining high business performance, guarantees system availability and reliability as well as safe and sustainable operations. Maintenance activity effectiveness depends on competences and the skills of operators whose performance strongly affects maintenance and production operations. The research field of human issues in industrial maintenance was deeply addressed in the literature; however, the current industrial paradigm, which focusses on the integration of new technologies in conventional manufacturing operations to support human performance, sheds light on new challenges for enterprises and opportunities for research in this field. While some literature reviews in the field of human errors and human factors are available, no study investigated the main topics, research trends and challenges related to the role of maintenance operators in manufacturing systems. This paper addresses the current state-of-the-art role of maintenance operators in manufacturing systems, providing an overview of the main studies. A systematic literature review was carried out to identify significant papers. Then, a topic modelling algorithm was used to detect the main topics of the selected papers to provide the research trends of the subject. The identified topics provided interesting research insights on the human role in industrial maintenance. Research trends and further research opportunities were defined

Taxonomy of Human Actions for Action-based Learning Assessment in Virtual Training Environments

This design research project developed and validated a taxonomy of human actions to be used in action-based learning assessment. The taxonomy, titled ‘BEHAVE,’ was shown to have both internal and external validity and allows actions performed by learners, for example in digital performance spaces, to be formally represented with consistency and to be compared with expert reference actions, to generate automated post-performance formative feedback

Scenario sharing in a collaborative virtual environment for training

International audienceIn this paper, we describe a system used in the context of virtual training on collaborative maintenance procedures where the focus is on the learning of the industrial procedure rather than technical gestures. In existing collaborative virtual environments for training the distribution of scenario actions among actors is fixed: only one role can be associated with a given scenario action. In this paper, we propose to overcome this limitation and to add a mechanism to deal with this new flexibility. This mechanism is able to dynamically select the best actor for an action, based on various criteria, and to propose a distribution of actions among actors. We also propose to add collaborative profiles to virtual humans to guide them in order to select the next action to perform, possibly following the distribution suggestion. Trainees and virtual humans can then adapt their activities while respecting the reference procedure