Application-specific design of assistance systems for manual work in production

Due to rising demand for customer-specific products, a growing number of product variants is increasing complexity in production systems. Since automated production systems are often not economical in high-variant production scenarios, human flexibility plays an important role. In recent years a variety of assistance systems have emerged that support manual work by collecting, processing and providing information. However, this technological leap is not widely applied in the industry yet. This paper presents an approach to application-specific design of assistance systems for manual work in production. Required assistance functions, application-specific requirements and a technology database are used for the preselection of technologies and components for an assistance system. Alternative assistance system solutions are generated according to application-specific needs and compared through an economic evaluation. An application of this approach is shown for a manual assembly system in the learning factory for cyber-physical production systems.