Human guidance and supervision of a manufacturing system for semi-automated production

Handcrafting is common in manufacturing processes, where human workers fulfill a central role regarding process knowledge and control, task complexity, fabrication techniques, and quality management. From an economic point of view, the handcrafting without any technical assistance allows manufacturing of products in an admissible quality range; however, the quality itself is strongly influenced by the skills of the human workers. Additionally, the repeatability of the product quality or the uniformity of the manually performed working steps throughout the manufacturing process is hard to keep in a reliable range. The dependency of human workers and the quality may cause defective products or increased manufacturing costs through corrective rebuilding, especially when skilled human employees are not available due to demographical reasons. The complexity of such kind of expertise-based manufacturing requires a detailed analysis of the manufacturing process in order to detect automatable sub-processes. Regarding human factor aspects on the one hand and economic goals on the other hand, the need of innovative production systems becomes clear. A separation of human workers and the process task by transferring the human worker to an operator role and by automatizing the quality related production sub-processes seems to be useful. As an illustrative example, the process analysis of a handcrafted molding process is performed. Thereby, the cast part quality is mainly influenced by the quality of the mold, which underlies individual fabrication variations due to an expertise-based handcrafted production process in a noxious environment common in this casting technology field.