Manual Assembly Workstation Redesign Based on a New Quantitative Method for Postural Comfort Evaluation

Main purpose of this work is to show how easy and economics an ergonomic/comfort based approach, in re-design a manual assembly workplace, can be; authors, using a new comfort/ergonomic evaluation criterion, analyzed a workstation and identified the critical issues under ergonomic/comfort point of view and finally gave several guidelines to re-design the workplace, implementing minor modification, and improve work-safety, work-quality and productivity. The postural analysis was performed by non-invasive and especially inexpensive methods, based on cameras and video-recorder use and by photogrammetric analysis; DELMIA® DHM software has been used to perform all simulations; comfort analysis was performed by the software developed by researchers of Departments of Industrial Engineering of Salerno: CaMAN®. The test case is an automatic assembly machine that has been modeled and used for virtual postural analysis. Main results of this work can be found in a very good numerical/experimental correlation between acquired/simulated postures and real ones, and on the powerful use of an objective comfort evaluation method, based on biomechanics and posture analysis, for giving to designers the guidelines to re-design a workplace and a work-cycle. This kind of approach seemed to be very powerful in re-designing the work-place and in re-scheduling the work time-sheet because it allowed to improve an ergonomic corrective action with minor costs for company. Obtained results demonstrated the validity of re-design hypotheses through the increase of all comfort indexes and the improvement of workstation/operator productivity.

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