Requirements for Modeling the Human Operator in Socio-Technical Production Systems

Abstract

The changing world economy makes high demands on today's production systems. In order to stay competitive, companies, especially in high-wage countries, have to adjust their production for enabling customer individual wishes. The human operator provides meaningful skills including sensorimotorical skills and the capability of creative thinking from which the production system can significantly benefit. For establishing effective human-machine cooperation, both the employee and the technical system need to have an understanding of each other so that they can estimate the counterpart. In this paper, the requirements for introducing the human operator in technical models of production systems are described. Furthermore, first solutions are presented to implement effective human-machine cooperation.