Human Factor Analyser for work measurement of manual manufacturing and assembly processes

The novel generation of production facilities fostered by the fourth industrial revolution widely adopts different technologies to digitalise the manufacturing and assembly processes. In this context, work measurement techniques are one of the main candidates for the application of these new technologies because of the time, cost, and competences required to analyse manual production activities and considering the limited precision of the traditional approaches. This paper proposes a new hardware/software architecture devoted to the motion and time analysis of the activities performed by human operators within whatsoever industrial workplace. This architecture, called Human Factor Analyser (HFA), is constituted by a network of ad hoc depth cameras able to track the worker movements during the task execution without any interference with the monitored process. The data provided by these cameras are then elaborated in a post-process phase by the HFA to automatically and quantitatively measure the work content of the considered activities through an accurate motion and time analysis. The developed architecture evaluates the worker in a 3D environment considering his interaction with the industrial workplace through the definition of appropriate control volumes within the layout. To test the accuracy of HFA, an extensive experimental campaign is performed at the Bologna University Laboratory for Industrial Production adopting several realistic industrial configurations (different workplaces, operators and tasks). Finally, the HFA is applied to a real manufacturing case study of an Italian company producing refrigerator metal grates. A wide and deep analysis of the obtained key results is presented and discussed.