Influences of Human Operators on the Logistics of Manufacturing Cells

Human operators have important influences on the logistic behaviour of manufacturing cells. In many of the possible configurations of a manufacturing cell, operators represent the bottleneck of the cell. Thus they dominate the cell’s logistic behaviour. This paper explains how the theory of logistic manufacturing cell operating curves considers human influences on manufacturing cell logistics. The operating curves are a tool to analyse the logistic performance of manufacturing cells. Therefore they represent a means for determining logistically suitable configurations of the human-machine interactions between the human operators and the work systems in manufacturing cells.