assistance system

An important element for companies to deal with the demands of the world of work is the continuous and needs-specific further training of employees. The possibility of learning close to the workplace has a major role to play here.

The employee remains a key productivity element in industrial assembly. Assembly assistance systems have therefore become an integral part of employee support. This paper presents a novel assistance system that complements process-related assistance with human-centered functionalities. In addition, an approach for the systematic evaluation of assembly assistance systems is presented in this paper. The research is based on an evaluation of the current state of the art through systematic market analysis of available assembly assistance systems.

Industry 4.0 and digitalisation are also increasingly finding their way into everyday production processes in SMEs. The focus is e. g. on assistance systems that support employees in their work. Resulting communication is significantly facilitated and at the same time the required information is available at the appropriate workplace at the right time. The ‘Mittelstand 4.0 Kompetenzzentrum Chemnitz‘ has dedicated itself to this challenge together with two SMEs.

The application of digital work assistance systems is gaining practical relevance on the shopfloor. Experience shows that the use of a work assistance system orients itself on the individual capabilities of its user and the specific work requirements. This excludes standard solutions. To order the variety of assistive functions in an application context, the assistance systems are classified in the present article. It also discusses the design requirements and applications use from an ergonomic perspective, which places the working man and his individual capabilities, which vary during working life, at the center of consideration. The reader can better assess the potential benefits and application limits of digital work assistance systems in an operational context.

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.

Handling complexity is one of the key topics of producing enterprises worldwide. It can be noted that enterprises are indeed able to coop with the complexity of single processes due to a function-oriented organisation, yet the same organisational paradigm leads to local objective systems that in many cases are contrary to the global goals of the enterprise. The same problem is reflected and supported by the enterprise’s IT systems. Thus, in this paper we present an approach to convert the inflexible function oriented operations into comprehensive processes by introducing special IT systems, so-called logistic assistance systems. To illustrate the approach we introduce the problem of integrated order sequencing and transport planning in the automotive industry and present a prototypical solution.