Objective
The focus of this project is to provide a set of software tools to design and evaluate a human centred work system for a proposed product.
It does this in three ways: it integrates several stages of planning so that they can be carried out concurrently with product design, it provides software tools to evaluate the ergonomics, safety and health aspects of the design of the work system when it exists only in virtual form on the computer, it integrates some Industrial Engineering tools to evaluate the productivity of the proposed system.
Existing procedures for pre-production planning are time consuming and error prone, may require several iterations, including modification to the product design, and, in many cases, the appropriate information is not easily available. The work needs to be done much more quickly and give workstations that are of better quality. The proposed software will be easy to use, modular, suitable for use by companies of all sizes (including SMEs) and sufficiently open for it to be relatively straightforward to link other software to it. It will provide a holistic view of the process and will enable non specialists to choose the most appropriate manufacturing configurations for the workers. Novel features are the integration of the Industrial Engineering evaluations with the ergonomics, safety and health evaluations, and the ability to simulate the work system dynamically.