Interactive Simulation and Ergonomics Assessment of Manual Work With EMA – Applications in Product Development and Production Planning

The software tool EMA (“Editor for Manual Work Activities”) facilitates digital production planning and ergonomics assessment by providing a more efficient and accurate approach to 3D human simulation. EMA uses a modular system for describing human work activities based on a pre-defined library of “complex operations”, which allows the generation and simulation of human movements with highly-automated algorithms. Moreover, EMA includes standard tools for the assessment of ergonomic strains (EAWS – “Ergonomic Assessment Worksheet”) and production time (MTM – “Methods Time Measurement”). After introducing some basic analysis functions of EMA and their typical use cases, this paper presents an evaluation study that examines the validity of EMA ergonomic evaluations in comparison to paper-pencil-assessments with EAWS. Moreover, this paper shows several use cases of the EMA software application in automotive and aviation industry. These applications illustrate that EMA considerably reduces the effort for preparing human simulations and enables the user to analyze ergonomic conditions (body posture, action forces, manual load handling) and productivity (e.g., walk ways) very thoroughly.