Autor: Dirk Berndt

The authors present a methodological approach for designing assistance systems conducive to learning and derive requirements for their design. They base the design of these systems on a fundamental understanding of the cooperation between humans and machines, which still places decisions and responsibility with humans. Finally, the authors show concrete requirements and measures of a participatory design and implementation process.

The article presents design approaches and methods for the implementation of adaptive assistance systems and shows the influence of different operational roles on the design process. A user-adaptive and context-sensitive design makes it possible to adapt the contents and the presentation to the requirements of the user and to the task. We present a systematic approach that shows the design dimensions based on individual and task-related categories. We supplement this systematic with design dimensions of an assistance system including the technology selection as well as the design.

Assistance technologies are an approach to support skilled workers in their work processes that are currently changing under the influence of the 4th industrial revolution. They aim at reducing physical and psychological stress by processing the big amount of decision-relevant data in a way that it serves workers for their decision-making process. Work places need to be designed in a way that they encourage learning and competence development and that involves future users in this design process.

Maintenance activities require a high degree of problem solving capacity from the specialists in order to be able to successfully carry out troubleshooting tasks. The expertise of the specialists is based in particular on the successful use of knowledge in problem solving situations [2]. Assistance systems should therefore support the specialist in the learning or reflection process and offer the opportunity to use the experience gained from previous measures for the current problem solution. The present paper describes an approach to the development of assistance systems for learning.

On the step to the 4th industrial revolution, production systems are changing in a consequence of technological further developments. The technological development goes along with new concepts for the design of work places and organizational processes. The paper at hand focusses on the resulting changes for employees, the design of working environments and the need for new qualification measures. The paper shows that learning and working will be more and more integrated. This will lead to systems that will be applied directly on the shop floor.

Customized product variants and ever shorter development cycles are defining the basic challenges in product life cycles. Moreover, enhanced product quality is connected with increasing product complexity and necessitates adapting workflow organization and integrating IT aids, which are intended to minimize process times, reduce fault potential and render complex work steps manageable. Augmented reality technology helps meeting increased requirements, particularly for manual work. Projects from the Fraunhofer IFF provide a basis to elucidate current issues in research and application.