Industrial workstations design: a real case study

Abstract

The research work advances the effective design of the most critical workstations belonging to a real industrial plant; to this end, the authors propose an approach based on the integration of Modeling & Simulation tools, several ergonomic standards and the most known work measurement tools. The Modeling and simulation tools allow to implement a three-dimensional environment capable of recreating, with satisfactory accuracy, the evolution over the time of the real workstations. The ergonomic standards consent to evaluate the ergonomic risks level within the system being considered. The work measurement tools permit to calculate the time required for performing all the workstations operations. The effective design of the workstations is achieved by using the simulation model for comparing workstations' alternative configurations. The comparison is based on ergonomic and time indexes related to the ergonomic standards and the work measurement tools. Such comparison allows to choose the workstations final configurations.

A general framework for the manufacturing workstation design optimization: a combined ergonomic and operational approach

“…The authors already carried out research activities (in cooperation with the same manufacturing system) on workstation ergonomic effective design 72 and production planning and control. 73 A brief description of the operations performed in each workstation of the industrial plant is reported below.…”