Towards the Resilient Operator 5.0: The Future of Work in Smart Resilient Manufacturing Systems

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown industries all around the world that their current manufacturing systems are not as resilient as expected and therefore many are failing. The workforce is the most agile and flexible manufacturing resource and simultaneously the most fragile one due to its humanity. By making human operators more resilient against a range of factors affecting their work and workplaces, enterprises can make their manufacturing systems more resilient. This paper introduces "The Resilient Operator 5.0" concept, based on human operator resilience and human-machine systems\u27 resilience, providing a vision for the future of work in smart resilient manufacturing systems in the emerging Industry 5.0 hallmark. It suggests how to achieve appropriate smart manufacturing systems\u27 resilience from a human-centric perspective through the means of the Operator 4.0 typology and its related technical solutions

Does Levels of Automation need to be changed in an assembly system? - A case study

Production of to day is getting more and more competitive and companies have to be on top in their area in order to survive. This paper discuss if Levels of Automation need to be changed in assembly systems in order to achieve companies goals when it comes to flexibility and time minimisation. The empirical data is gathered through case studies at six different companies

The Operator 4.0: Towards socially sustainable factories of the future

Humans are all makers of a sort. The tools we operate constantly leverage our human capabilities and evolve over history to take advantage of any innovation or a new source of power that emerges. Human-Technology Symbiosis has always been the basis for leaps in human prosperity. As we are presently in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, it is important to focus on challenges and opportunities of contemporary work-life. Here we find the worker, the operator, benefitting from cyber-physical systems technology, connectivity, and global information networks while retaining human strengths and weaknesses. This special issue will describe the implications of a new breed of the manufacturing worker, “The Operator 4.0”. The 13 contributions in this special issue will take us from the early anthropocentric organisational models to the emerging connected and cyber-physically enhanced “Operator 4.0” in highly dynamic work environments. Methods and tools for development and analysis of complex work will support the scholar or practitioner that would like to dig deeper into the future of the potential work-life of the Operator 4.0

Analysing changeability and time parameters due to levels of Automation in an assembly system

Products of today are becoming increasingly customized. Smaller batches in the assembly and decreasing time limits for set-ups between products are some of the resulting demands on the assembly systems, due to the increasing number of variants in the assembly flow. Consequently, assembly systems have to become more flexible and efficient. When companies adopt automated solutions, there is a need to determine the correct amount of automation. It is also necessary to identify the optimal parts of the value-flow to be automated. In automation decisions it is necessary to consider human resources, as well as mechanical technology and information flow. The paper will discuss the importance of measuring different time parameters in an assembly system. Furthermore an analysis of the ability to change level of automation in an assembly system will be discussed based on theory and a case study exampl

Handling of Production Disturbances in the Manufacturing Industry

Purpose – A common understanding of what events to regard as production disturbances (PD) are essential for effective handling of PDs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to answer the two questions: how are individuals with production or maintenance management positions in industry classifying different PD factors? Which factors are being measured and registered as PDs in the companies monitoring systems? Design/methodology/approach – A longitudinal approach using a repeated cross-sectional survey design was adopted. Empirical data were collected from 80 companies in 2001 using a paper-based questionnaire, and from 71 companies in 2014 using a web-based questionnaire. Findings – A diverging view of 21 proposed PD factors is found between respondents in manufacturing industry, and there is also a lack of correspondence with existing literature. In particular, planned events are not classified and registered to the same extent as downtime losses. Moreover, the respondents are often prone to classify factors as PDs compared to what is actually registered. This diverging view has been consistent for over a decade, and hinders companies to develop systematic and effective strategies for handling of PDs. Originality/value – There has been no in-depth investigation, especially not from a longitudinal perspective, of the personal interpretation of PDs from people who play a central role in achieving high reliability of production systems

From Task Allocation Towards Resource Allocation when Optimising Assembly Systems

The article discusses the question; is it possible to reach route flexibility and system proactivity through resource allocation and task optimisation. In order to answer this, differences between three types of optimisation regarding task and resource allocation are discussed: Global Task and Resource optimisation, Task optimisation and local resource allocation, but with resource alternatives, Task optimisation and local resource allocation (optimisation), with prioritised resources, shown as a possible solution in this paper in order to increase the route flexibility and proactivity in the system planning. An example of the last approach will be shown using a logic language (SOP) with help of software tool called Sequence Planner (SP)

Human operator and robot resource modeling for planning purposes in assembly systems

This paper presents how robot and human resources can be modeled for planning purposes. Instead of using simplistic models such as available or unavailable resources, the method for modeling resources presented in this paper integrates parameters that are realistic and relevant for the considered assembly system. For example, a robot resource model can take into account maintenance tasks and ramp-up parameters. The framework of this modeling is based on the definition of Sequences of Operations (SOPs) and includes a formal relation between product operations and resources abilities. The main idea is to avoid the representation of long and static sequences of operations, since this typically reduces flexibility and is even intractable for large systems. To tackle this issue, relations between operations and resources are defined using only strictly necessary pre-conditions and post-conditions for each individual operation. The Sequences of Operations that permit to express the minimally restrictive behavior of an assembly system are automatically generated. Finally, the SOPs can be viewed from different angles, e.g. from a product or a resource perspective. These multiple views increase the interoperability between different engineering disciplines. Experiments have shown that, even for simple examples, obtaining the optimized assembly sequence is not an easy task. That is why a sequence planning software associated to realistic resource models, including both humans and robots, as presented in this paper, is a crucial help to increase flexibility in assembly systems that require different Levels of Automation

Smart Maintenance: an empirically grounded conceptualization

How do modernized maintenance operations, often referred to as “Smart Maintenance”, impact the performance of manufacturing plants? The inability to answer this question backed by data is a problem for industrial maintenance management, especially in light of the ongoing rapid transition towards an industrial environment with pervasive digital technologies. To this end, this paper, which is the first part of a two-paper series, aims to investigate and answer the question, “What is Smart Maintenance?”. The authors deployed an empirical, inductive research approach to conceptualize Smart Maintenance using focus groups and interviews with more than 110 experts from over 20 different firms. By viewing our original data through the lens of multiple general theories, our findings chart new directions for contemporary and future maintenance research. This paper describes empirical observations and theoretical interpretations cumulating in the first empirically grounded definition of Smart Maintenance and its four underlying dimensions; data-driven decision-making, human capital resource, internal integration, and external integration. In addition, the relationships between the underlying dimensions are specified and the concept structure formally modeled. This study thus achieves concept clarity with respect to Smart Maintenance, thereby making several theoretical and managerial contributions that guide both scholars and practitioners within the field of industrial maintenance management

Prerequisites for a high-level framework to design sustainable plants in the e-waste supply chain

Currently few attempts to properly structure knowledge that specifically supports a fully sustainable e-waste treatment system design have been proposed in literature. As a result, this paper sets up the prerequisites for a high-level framework to design sustainable plants in the supply chain of e-waste. The framework addresses production and environmental engineers mainly. The methodology grows out of literature studies, research project’s outcomes and interviews with a group of sector experts. Stemming from this, a list of prerequisites was presented for the case study of an automated plant for e-waste sorting in order to design it while considering the triple-bottom-line of sustainability

Smart logistics and the logistics operator 4.0

The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to deeply change several aspects of the manufacturing industry. Among them, the logistics and supply chain activities will be affected by these changes both at operational and managerial level to face the market drivers of flexibility and mass-customisation. In this context, the work of operators in internal and external logistics will be affected by these changes and increase the interaction between humans and machines. The evolution of the roles of humans in Logistics 4.0 will give birth to "The Logistics Operator 4.0"paradigm. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impacts of Industry 4.0 technologies on the different roles of logistics operators that work in the main logistics domains and areas