Verification of Human Factors in Manufacturing Process Design

This paper investigates the concept of virtual experimentation for the verification of human related performance factors, associated to manual assembly processes. An immersive and interactive virtual environment has been created to provide functionality for realistic process experimentation. Ergonomic models and functions have been embedded into the virtual environment to support verification and to constrain experimentation to ergonomically acceptable conditions. A specific assembly test case is presented, for which a semi-empirical time model has been developed employing experimentation in the virtual environment. The virtual experimentation results enable the quantification and prediction of the influence of a number of process parameters and their combination on the process cycle time.