Human Factors Engineering at Design Projects for Process Industry - Challenges and Lessons Learned

This paper summarises current industrial practices and standards promoting Human Factors Engineering (HFE) at design stage and revise them with an action research approached based on the concrete case studies performed during a European project called TOSCA. The paper highlights how HFE can significantly impact the costs and risk associated with a plant lifecycle and the current gaps and issues encountered. The gaps identified are used to guide industrial practices and standards towards a more valuable inclusion of Human Factors knowledge in structured system design processes to support human performance and reduce the potential for human errors in operations and maintenance

A multi-discipline method to assess the human performance in manufacturing industry for safety and quality optimization

Nowadays the majority of organizations operating in manufacturing field recognize the importance of including the Human Factor contribution in the industrial process optimization (Hong et al. 2007). Technical measures and work organization procedures have been optimized in order to reduce the defects and waste generation but the Human Performance prediction still represents for Managers a difficult task to deal with. The prediction of the human performances of all workers involved in a production system would help Managers in better allocating the human resources. In order to reach this objective, a model to quantify the human capability of managing a complex task in a working context characterized by a set of physical, organizational and cognitive factors was designed. This paper presents the preliminary results of a three years industry/academia partnership project to assess the human performance in manufacturing plant. A multi-discipline approach involving both technical and individual factors was adopted

Hazard Perception and Reporting

Reporting of hazards is a key aspect of safety management in industry, but relatively little empirical investigation of reporting has been undertaken. This research reports on an investigation that was carried out in the Science gallery at Trinity College Dublin to explore the detection and reporting of hazards by members of the public. Three simulated hazards were developed and placed around the risk lab. The experiment was designed to assess the capacity to recall recognise and report hazards of the participants by means of an exit survey. Participants performed better at recognition than recollection with no actual reporting of hazards recorded. The results validated some of the findings suggested by the literature and can assist in the development of a new experimental methodology as training within organizations to improve awareness of hazards and reporting practices

Human skills assessment as a support to human factor management

Automatization, robotics and Industry 4.0 are deeply modifying the working condition with an expected reduction of the number of workers employed in traditional job and an increasing request of new professions. Despite these technologies could limit the involvement of workers, in some sectors humans are still widely employed, as in assembly line of manufacturing companies. As a consequence of this, the Human Factor (HF) will still have relevant influence in term efficiency, quality and safety performances. This paper approached the HF analysis into the manufacturing field in an assembly line. This study was focused on the analysis of those human-skills that are mainly solicited by the workload of the task that a worker has to perform during his own working activity. A set of practical test was designed and used to measure those skills during the real working activity. Results showed a wide range of performances reflecting different levels of skills between workers. This kind of information can support the human resources management because it allowed a worker classification based on their own skills. This classification can be directly applied to optimize the allocation of workers in assembly line with the using of Human Performance model and it can lead the way to a personalized risk assessment based on personal skills evaluation

Human performance in manufacturing tasks: Optimization and assessment of required workload and capabilities

This paper discusses some examples where human performance and or human error prediction was achieved by using a modified version of the Rasch model(1980), where the probability of a specified outcome is modelled as a logistic function of the difference between the person capacity and item difficulty. The model needs to be modified to take into account an outcome that may not be dichotomous and o take into account the interaction between two macro factors: (a) Task complexity: that summarises all factors contributing to physical and mental workload requirements for execution of a given operative task & (b) Human capability: that considered the skills, training and experience of the people facing the tasks, representing a synthesis of their physical and cognitive abilities to verify whether or not they are matching the task requirements. Task complexity can be evaluated as a mathematical construct considering the compound effects of Mental Workload Demands and Physical Workload Demands associated to an operator task. Similarly, operator capability can be estimated on the basis of the operators\u27 set of cognitive capabilities and physical conditions. The examples chosen for the application of the model were quite different: one is a set of assembly workstation in large computer manufacturing company and the other a set of workstation in the automotive sector. This paper presents and discusses the modelling hypothesis, the interim field data collection, results and possible future direction of the studies