Design of an Assembly Workplace for Aging Workforce and Worker with Disabilities

Abstract

Abstract With the introduction of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (also known as Industry 4.0 or I4.0) the use of worker assistance systems gets more and more important. These assistance systems should support the worker to reduce both mental as well as physical stress and at the same time increase ergonomics. Besides the before mentioned positive aspects of assistance systems they can also support the inclusion of workers with limitations in the daily industrial production environment. In this paper, we apply Axiomatic design (AD) to systematically design a future operator’s workplace for older workers and workers with disabilities. Therefore, we conducted interviews with employers and physical and mental disabled people to identify the customer needs (CNs) and set constraints (Cs). In a next step, we defined the first level functional requirements (FRs) and the deduced corresponding design parameters (DPs). Following, the decomposition and mapping process and considering the independence and information axiom we designed a workplace equipped with worker assistance systems for better integrating elderly people and people with disabilities in manufacturing.