Towards Operator Empowerment in Assembly Lines with Human-Centered Design: A Concept with Application in the Automotive Industry
Johannes Zysk, Constantinos Florides, Johanna M. Werz, Aymen Gannouni, Eilís Carey, Friedrich Wolf, Esther Borowski, Ingrid Isenhardt · Procedia CIRP · 2024
In the context of Industry 4.0, the focus often does not lie on human involvement, while a lack of knowledge about workers’ requirements diminishes their acceptance of processes and systems. Furthermore, domain-specific solutions fail to fully capture these requirements in manufacturing, especially in assembly lines. Therefore, a human-centered design approach is essential to empower operators and strengthen their acceptance of digital assistance systems. The question arises of how to implement such an approach in manufacturing and how to engage assembly line operators to meet their requirements and enhance adoption. In this work, we propose a mixed-methods approach that involves workers as much as possible in the conception and design of enhanced digital assistance systems. The approach provides a new foundation for operator empowerment in assembly lines, which we demonstrate in a use case from the automotive sector. This demonstration includes the results of a first workshop with workers, identifying their requirements and discussing their needs. The future work consists of developing design prototypes for an assistance system, which will be evaluated by interviewing the end-users and investigating its impact with comparison measures.