Title: A human factors assessment model for sustainable manufacturing

Authors: Margherita Peruzzini; Marcello Pellicciari

Addresses: Department of Engineering "Enzo Ferrari", University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, via Vivarelli, 10, 41125 Modena (MO), Italy ' Department of Engineering "Enzo Ferrari", University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, via Vivarelli, 10, 41125 Modena (MO), Italy

Abstract: Although factories are becoming smarter and more and more automated, thanks to ICT penetration, process performances still highly depend on 'humans in the loop' who have to carry out their tasks by perceiving and understanding increasingly complex multidimensional data sets. Forecasting the human behaviours and assessing how human factors affect the process performance are very difficult but fundamental for strategic decision-making and sustainable manufacturing. In this context, the research highlights the need of predictive methods to design human-centred smart manufacturing systems from the early design stages as an important part of the overall assessment of process sustainability. The paper defines a model to early assess human factors to be integrated with other existing models (i.e., cost estimation and lifecycle assessment) to evaluate manufacturing process sustainability. The proposed integrated method can be fruitfully used to support the design of sustainable manufacturing systems by taking into account also the impact on workers. An industrial case study focusing on packaging machines design is presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method and its adoption to propose re-design action promoting sustainability.

Keywords: sustainable manufacturing; SM; human factors; sustainability assessment; design for sustainability; key performance indicators; KPIs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2017.088511

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2017 Vol.10 No.3/4, pp.206 - 230

Received: 04 Jan 2017
Accepted: 10 Mar 2017

Published online: 11 Dec 2017 *

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