Human Fatigue Aware Cyber-Physical Production System

Abstract

Production systems contain advanced automated processes, and humans are involved in activities, such as monitoring, managing and/or operating, to ensure the right functioning of these systems. The challenge for industries is to develop human-centred scheduling systems that orchestrate the interaction between human and machines devices considering both operations productivity and human well-being. In this paper, a cyber-physical production system integrating a smart station is proposed to dynamically change the schedule of tasks to human operators, regarding the cognitive fatigue level during execution. The smart station consists in a human operator connected to a galvanometer that tracks electric currents on his skin coupled to a virtual holon that seeks the human well-being minimising his cognitive fatigue estimated from the tracking of the current. This Holon is also in charge of the modification of the scheduling through the adaption of the workload. A real experiment has been conducted to validate the contribution of the proposed approach and the results demonstrate significant mitigation of human wellbeing degradation in term of cognitive fatigue.