Improving workers conditions within industrial workstations

The paper aims at improving the workers conditions within a workstation (Assembly workstation) belonging to an industrial plant operating in the field of mechanical parts production. To this end, the authors proposes an approach based on the integration of Modelling & Simulation (M&S) tools and several ergonomic standards. M&S tools are used for developing a simulation model capable of recreating, with satisfactory accuracy, the evolution over the time of the real workstation. The ergonomic standards are accomplished for evaluating and analyzing the ergonomic risk level within the system being considered. Several workstation modifications are incorporated in the simulation model and the effects (ergonomic risk level) of such changes are analyzed for designing an improved workstation configuration in terms of interaction between operators and their industrial working environment.