In recent years, the introduction of a production system in which humans and machines work together is becoming essential. However, in order to maintain productivity and safety, workers currently follow the movements of robots, which places a great deal of stress on them. One solution to this problem is a detailed analysis of human movements. With the ultimate goal of building a system that balances productivity and safety, we measured the task of arranging parts on a tray, which is commonly performed at manufacturing sites, as a clue. We measured, compared, and analyzed the part arrangement work of five new and five mid-level workers. As a result, we found that the number of parts arranged on the tray was greater for novices than for mid-level workers, but that the novices also made more mistakes in arranging parts. This result suggested the need to improve the tray so that even workers with little work experience can arrange parts correctly without making mistakes. In addition, we measured the number of times that staff were called when work was interrupted and they failed to resume, and the latency time from failure to calling, we found that mid-level workers tended to try to solve the problem by themselves without calling. This result indicates the possibility of improving the environment by building and displaying HMIs that suits the level of mid-level workers, and by restricting the range of operation. Up until now, much effort has been put into building systems that are suited to inexperienced workers, but the results of this experiment indicate the need to also consider building systems that are suited to the behavioral characteristics seen in mid-level workers. In the future, it is believed that both safety and productivity can be improved by optimizing equipment operation methods and display content according to the skill level of workers.
Arakaki et al. (Wed,) studied this question.