Abstract
(English)
|
The goal of the PSIM-project (Participative Simulation environment for Integral Manufacturing enterprise renewal) is to develop a system that supports assembly process improvement. The system allows the use of advanced simulation software in an integrated and on-going manner. This new simulation system includes the latest ICT systems with the most recent knowledge of sociotechnical system design and ergonomics.
The market is forcing companies to increase the diversity of their product range, with customers constantly becoming more demanding in terms of delivery times and reliability, quality and price. So assembly process management is taking on a more crucial role. Key elements include technical and organizational innovations to reduce order throughput time and to lower failure costs. Equally important is the need for ergonomically and sociotechnically sound workplaces where employees can carry out assembly work in a motivated, efficient and healthy manner.
With the help of PSIM, production employees, management, designers and equipment manufacturers can test the effects of a new or redesigned assembly line even before it is built. People from various departments can join together to redesign an assembly process. For that purpose tools have been developed that support sociotechnical and ergonomical analysis and design. These tools have been integrated into a participative redesign procedure as well as into a software environment.
ETH was mainly involved in the development of the sociotechnical tool for analysis and design and in its integration into the PSIM environment. The tool defines a procedure and offers support for analyzing production units by introducing sociotechnical criteria as well as for finding design solutions. Compared with 'classical' approaches to analysis and design the tool offers three specific benefits: (i) Visualization of assumptions regarding interrelations among and between design parameters and design objectives, (ii) visualization of the dynamics resulting from complex interrelations between and among design parameters and design objectives, and (iii) support of virtualized workshops that are distributed in time and place. Three main phases of the tool procedure can be discerned. The aim of the first phase is to define design objectives. It is possible to derive objectives either from the existing problems in the production process or from already existing ideas of solutions that need to be evaluated and concretized. In the second phase the defined work system (i.e. the organizational units of concern) and the objectives are assessed and analyzed. The aim of this phase is to create insight into the relations between the sociotechnical design of the defined work systems and the design objectives defined in phase one. With help of this knowledge targets for sociotechnical design are derived. The criteria used in the tool are adopted from the KOMPASS-method. By applying these criteria, three levels of sociotechnical design are considered: the level of the work system, the level of the individual task and the level of the human-machine function allocation. In this phase the tool users have to define for every design criterion the relevance on all objectives. This way a participatory developed network between the objectives and the criteria is established. With this network's help the tool users can explore and evaluate the dependencies between the objectives and criteria in an interactive way. In the third phase support is offered for developing and evaluating sociotechnical solutions. The aim of this phase is to have evaluated and concretized solutions. Guidelines and examples presented by multimedia support the tool users step by step.
The concepts of the ergonomic and the sociotechnical tool were in a first step tested on the basis of paper pencil versions. Results from these tests were thereafter used to prepare software prototypes. At a conceptual level the software is integrated into one tool: the E/S tool. In the same time a procedure was developed. This procedure (part of the handbook) guides companies in the use of PSIM.
A concept for a software environment was developed to make the connection of the E/S-tool with different users and existing software. The environment consists of an ontology that provides the language for different software packages to communicate, a navigator, that is able to connect the users and packages, and an integrator, that makes ERP-data available to the PSIM-system.
At the sites of the industrial partners (VOLVO, Ford, Finland Post, CRFiat, and Yamatake) different parts of the PSIM-system have been tested at a conceptual as well as at a prototype level. On the basis of these tests the concepts and the prototypes will now be optimized in the remaining project time.
|
