A Study on the Efficiency Evaluation for the Motion Parameters of the Manual Welding Process Using Data Envelopment Analysis

Abstract

The shipbuilding industry has applied automatic welding systems to increase productivity as well as address the shortage of skilled welder. However, a manual labor is still required in welding process where automatic systems cannot be applied. Since the past decade, the number of skilled welders in the shipbuilding industry has been continuously decreasing. Accordingly, various education equipment and systems have been developed for the manual welding process in order to increase education efficiency and reduction of training time . However, when educating trainees, the educational equipment and systems prioritize parameters such as current, voltage, gas flow, and wire speed. In contrast, ergonomic parameters such as hand tremor and posture are neglected as minor factors . Therefore, in this study, we analyzed the skilled welders and trainees and compared them to increase education efficiency. To conduct this study, we utilized analysis methods based on data envelopment (DEA) and statistics . DEA can evaluate the relative efficiency between decision making units (DMUs) and derive improvement way based on the efficiency ratios. The proposed method can derive the improvement way of each trainee among ergonomic parameters based on the experimental outcome from the DEA.