Enabling Resilient Production Through Adaptive Human-Machine Task Sharing

Human capabilities to interact, interfere, support, supervise and take over different tasks in a production environment are often not considered in the context of automated and self-organizing factories (smart factories). Adaptive Task Sharing (ATS) is a method to combine the strengths of automation and human skills to provide flexible and resilient factories. ATS offers huge potential for improving and enhancing ergonomics and human factors in production. The assembly worker plays a vital role in such hybrid manufacturing as a partner and coordinator of production services. In recent years, techniques have been developed to efficiently compute production execution graphs optimized for various technical criteria, like minimum makespan or energy consumption. This paper shows how to use these techniques for a flexible production planning that incorporates human workers and investigates different scenarios of task allocation between humans and machines and their impact on production workflows. Such socio-technical interactions between humans and machines need to be at the core of resilient production systems to deal with unforeseen circumstances, provide the flexibility required in high-variability, low-volume production scenarios, and increase productivity and workplace quality of human workers.