Definition and Verification of Workers' Aptitude Toward Assembly Tasks in Production Cells

Abstract

: Major studies on cell production have put the emphasis on technical factors (machine order/layout, family part grouping, workflow sequence, etc.), it is still insufficient to investigate how workers' aptitude affect the productivity of production cells. As the first attempt to examine the workers' aptitude toward the assembly tasks in production cells, we make a comparatively detailed literature review on the major theories and assessment measures developed in the field of industrial and organizational psychology. Then we give the definition of four aptitudes and related hypotheses from the aspects of workers' cognition and interest, finger dexterity, affection, and behavioral intention. We design a self-evaluation sheet to measure the workers' aptitudes, and moreover design a cell production experiment to investigate the relation between the workers' aptitudes and productivity of production cells. Through our experimental study, we verified statistically that the workers' cognition and interest, negative affection correlate significantly to the productivity of production cells. However, there are still some issues to be addressed further in order to measure the workers' aptitudes through the self-evaluation sheet.

Using high-fidelity meta-models to improve performance of small dataset trained Bayesian Networks

“…Selecting the right workers for each of the intertwined jobs is important to ensure the success of assembly and manufacturing outcomes. A competitive edge could be gained by ensuring workers with the most suitable skills are assigned to a job (Ong, Ato, Umar, & Oshino, 2016). From a data collection perspective, however, the limited quantity of planes (i.e.…”

Investigating Impact of Human Factors in Cell Production System through Comparison of Two Groups of Workers

“…In order to evaluate more precisely impact of human factors, we have made a series of experimental studies [8]- [11], where a laboratory experiment of cell production was conducted to measure performance of production cells by the assembly times, and at the same time, several question-naires were conducted to measure the workers' aptitude or identify their individual difference. Because the workers participated in all of these experiments were the students of Fukushima University, it is necessary to clarify whether the experiment results obtained from the student workers can also be fitted to general workers.…”