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ABSTRACT
In recent years, there have been more and more collaborative workplaces in different types of manufacturing systems. Although the introduction of collaborative workplaces can be cost-effective, there is still much uncertainty about how such workplaces affect the capacity of the rest of production system. The article presents the importance of introducing collaborative workplaces in manual assembly operations where the production capacities are already limited. With the simulation modelling method, the evaluation of the introduction impact of collaborative workplaces on manual assembly operations that represent bottlenecks in the production process is presented. The research presents two approaches to workplace performance evaluation, both simulation modelling and a real-world collaborative workplace example, as a basis of a detailed time study. The main findings are comparisons of simulation modelling results and a study of a real-world collaborative workplace, with graphically and numerically presented parameters describing the utilization of production capacities, their efficiency and financial justification. The research confirms the expediency of the collaborative workplaces use and emphasise the importance of further research in the field of their technological and sociological impacts.
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Simulation modelling; Production system capacity; Industry 5.0; Assembly line; Human-robot collaboration; Collaborative workplace
Article history:
Received 7 September 2021
Revised 11 December 2021
Accepted 13 December 2021
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
1.Introduction
Optimization of production systems has been an attractive research field for many decades. Researchers are constantly wondering how to improve production system capacity or use it as efficiently as possible. In recent years, there have been an increasing number of collaborative machines that, together with workers, form high flexible, economically justified collaborative workplaces. Collaborative machines are to some extent already well studied, but their impact on the collaborative workplace, on workers and more broadly on the manufactured system is often unknown. Where is the turning point when a collaborative workplace is economically, socially and from a capacity standpoint justified? We want to answer this complex research question.
Researchers have been asking for years who is working with whom (human with robot, or vice versa) [1]. This issue, given the complexity of the social dimensions of the collaborative workplace and the security parameters, raises a lot of unanswered questions from the worker's point of view [2]. The findings show that we...