Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
(2011) 5:423431
DOI 10.1007/s11740-011-0316-z
ASSEMBLY
Received: 16 February 2011 / Accepted: 1 April 2011 / Published online: 21 April 2011
German Academic Society for Production Engineering (WGP) 2011
1 Introduction
In high-wage countries many manufacturing systems are
highly automated. The main aim of automation is usually to
increase productivity and reduce personnel expenditures.
However, it is well known that highly automated systems are
investment-intensive and often generate a non-negligible
organizational overhead. Although this overhead is mandatory for manufacturing planning, numerical control programming and system maintenance, it does not directly add
value to the product to be manufactured. Highly automated
manufacturing systems therefore tend to be neither efficient
enough for small lot production (ideally one piece) nor
flexible enough to handle products to be manufactured in a
large number of variants. Despite the popularity of strategies
for improving manufacturing competitiveness like agile
manufacturing [1] that consider humans to be the most
valuable factors, one must conclude that especially in
high-wage countries the level of automation of many production systems has already been taken far without paying
sufficient attention to the specific knowledge, skills and
abilities of the human operator.
According to the law of diminishing returns that kind of
naive increase in automation will likely not lead to a significant increase in productivity but can also have adverse
effects. According to Kinkel et al. [2] the amount of
process errors is on average significantly reduced by
automation, but the severity of potential consequences of a
single error increases disproportionately. These ironies of
automation which were identified by Lisanne Bainbridge
as early as 1987 can be considered a vicious circle [3],
where a function that was allocated to a human operator
due to poor human reliability is automated. This automation results in higher function complexity, ultimately
increasing the cognitive loads of the human operator for
123
424
123
425
123
426
123
427
123
428
5 System evaluation
5.1 Reasoning component
In the following, only simulation results regarding the
reasoning component of the CCU are presented due to space
limitations. The depending variables in the simulation study
are the processing time and the number of required pick and
place operations (termed MTM-1 cycles).
To evaluate the effect of the independent variables
on the dependent variables, we carried out independent
simulation runs for workpieces assembled from identical
bricks. The independent variables are (1) size of the
product to be assembled (six levels: four to 24 bricks in
steps of four), (2) number of bricks provided at the queue
Fig. 3 Required MTM-1 cycles
of the reasoning component of
the CCU as a function of part
size and number of bricks
available at the queue (left
deterministic brick feed; right
stochastic brick feed)
123
429
123
430
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
References
1. Zhang Z, Sharifi H (2000) A methodology for achieving agility in
manufacturing organizations. Int J Oper Prod Manage
20(4):496512
2. Kinkel S, Friedwald M, Husing B, Lay G, Lindner R (2008)
Arbeiten in der Zukunft, Strukturen und Trends der Industriearbeit. Studien des Buros fur Technikfolgen-Abschatzung bei Deutschen Bundestag, 27th edn. Sigma, Berlin (in German)
3. Onken R, Schulte A (2010) System-ergonomic design of cognitive automation. Studies in computational intelligence, vol 235.
Springer, Berlin
4. Rasmussen J (1986) Information processing and human-machine
interaction. An Approach to Cognitive Engineering, NorthHolland
5. Wiendahl HP, ElMaraghy HA, Nyhuis P, Zah MF, Wiendahl HH,
Duffie N, Brieke M (2007) Changeable manufacturing. Classification, design and operation. Ann CIRP 56(2):783809
6. Eversheim W (1998) Organisation in der Produktionstechnik, Bd.
Konstruktion. Springer, Berlin
7. Kempf T, Herfs W, Brecher C (2008) Cognitive control technology for a self-optimizing robot based assembly cell. In:
123
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
Proceedings of the ASME 2008 international design engineering technical conferences & computers and information in engineering conference, America Society of Mechanical Engineers, US
Chong HQ, Tan AH, Ng GW (2007) Integrated cognitive architectures: a survey. Artif Intell Rev 28:103130
Anderson JR, Bothell D, Byrne MD, Douglass S, Lebiere C, Qin
Y (2004) An integrated theory of the mind. Psychol Rev
111:10361060
Langley P, Cummings K, Shapiro D (2004) Hierarchical skills
and cognitive architectures. In: Proceedings of the twenty-sixth
annual conference of the cognitive science society. Chicago
Lehman J, Laird J, Rosenbloom P (2006) A gentle introduction to
soar, an architecture for human cognition: 2006 update. Retrieved
17 May 2010 from http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/soar/sitemaker/docs/
misc/GentleIntroduction-2006.pdf
Jones RM, Laird JE, Nielsen PE, Coulter KJ, Kenny P, Koss FV
(1999) Automated intelligent pilots for combat flight simulation.
AI Magazine 20:2741
Stensrud B, Taylor G, Crossman J (2006) IF-Soar: a virtual,
speech-enabled agent for indirect fire training. In: Proceedings of
the 25th army science conference, Orlando, FL
Putzer HJ (2004) Ein uniformer Architekturansatz fur kognitive
Systeme und seine Umsetzung in ein operatives Framework.
Koster, Berlin (in German)
Janrathitikarn O, Long LN (2008) Gait control of a six-legged
robot on unlevel terrain using a cognitive architecture. In: Proceedings of the IEEE aerospace conference
Laird JE, Yager ES, Hucka M, Tuck CM (1991) Robo-soar: an
integration of external interaction, planning, and learning using
soar. Robot Auton Syst 8:113129
Hauck E, Ewert D, Schilberg D, Jeschke S (2010) Design of a
knowledge module embedded in a framework for a cognitive
system using the example of assembly tasks. In: Proceedings of
the 3rd international conference on applied human factors and
ergonomics. Taylor & Francis, Miami
Gat E (1998) On three-layer architectures. In: Kortenkamp D,
Bonnasso R, Murphy R (eds) Artificial intelligence and mobile
robots, pp 195211
Mayer M, Odenthal B, Faber M, Kabu W, Kausch B, Schlick C
(2009) Simulation of human cognition in self-optimizing
assembly systems. In: Proceedings of 17th world congress on
ergonomics IEA 2009. Beijing
Maynard HB, Stegemerten GJ, Schwab JL (1948) Methods-time
measurement. McGraw-Hill, London
Mayer M, Odenthal B, Grandt M, Schlick C (2008) Task-oriented
process planning for cognitive production systems using MTM,
In: Karowski W, Salvendy G (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd
international conference on applied human factors and ergonomic
(AHFE). USA Publishing, USA
Laired JE, Congdon CB (2006) The soar users manual version
8.6.3
Hollnagel E, Woods DD (2005) Joint cognitive systems: foundations of cognitive systems engineering. Taylor & Francis
Group, Boca Raton
Norros L, Salo L (2009) Design of joint systems: a theoretical
challenge for cognitive system engineering. Cogn Tech Work
11:4356
Mayer M, Odenthal B, Faber M, Kabu W, Jochems N, Schlick C
(2010) Cognitive engineering for self-optimizing assembly systems. In: Karwowski W, Salvendy G (eds) Advances in human
factors, ergonomics, and safety in manufacturing and service
industries. CRC Press, USA
Flemisch FO, Adams CA, Conway SR, Goodrich KH,
Palmer MT, Schutte PC (2003) The H-metaphor as a guideline
for vehicle automation and interaction. NASA/TM2003212672
431
Ueda K, Kimura F (eds) Manufacturing systems and technologies
for the new frontier. Springer, Berlin
29. Odenthal B, Mayer M, Kabu W, Kausch B, Schlick C (2009) An
empirical study of assembly error detection using an augmented
vision system. In: Virtual and mixed reality, VMR 2009, held as
part of HCI international 2009. San Diego
123