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Modern Mining and Its Challenges
Published in Joel Lööw, Bo Johansson, Eira Andersson, Jan Johansson, Designing Ergonomic, Safe, and Attractive Mining Workplaces, 2018
Joel Lööw, Bo Johansson, Eira Andersson, Jan Johansson
Johansson (1986) described work and technology in a Swedish underground iron ore mine between 1957 and 1984 in detail. He noted that in 1957, work in the mine utilized several machines, but the need for heavy manual labour was still significant. (Figure 1.2 depicts drilling around this time.) The degree of mechanization and technological sophistication was asymmetric throughout the mine. For example, the production activities used modern and sometimes semi-automated machines, while development work still utilized older types of machinery involving manual operations. (Figure 1.3 depicts a loader that was used in development work during this period.) The semi-automation consisted in, for example, partial automation of drill rigs where the operator had to feed drill steels to the drill. Work was organized into teams that were responsible for entire production cycles and planning. The company considered itself to have made use of technological development to improve work conditions and to increase productivity. Additionally, due to the demands for labour during this period, they implemented progressive staffing policies. At that time, the director of the company was illustrated as saying: In question of salaries, pensions and working hours, our company’s miners should be better off than any other comparable group of industrial workers in Sweden … The development that has led to the rapid improvement of working conditions with regards to spaces, ventilation, illumination, and so on, and to a lighter and less dangerous work, is important. And in the long run, those factors that relate to … that which can be summarized within the terms of satisfaction and well-being at work, may be even more important.(Johansson 1986, p. 125, our translation.)
Procedural content generation method for creating 3D graphic assets in Digital Twin
Published in Cogent Engineering, 2023
Yaqi Dai, Ray Y. Zhong, Henry Y.K. Lau
To address concerns caused by conventional methods to create 3D models for Digital Twin, a few new requirements have been raised, such as: To save workforce on maintenance, automation or semi-automation should be enabled for modifications.To save time, it should be easy to change then fast to iterate.To save development cost, it is crucial to reuse existing graphic assets. Consequently, new method should also be compatible with current tools.
Improvement of productivity by implementing occupational ergonomics
Published in Journal of Industrial and Production Engineering, 2022
Human fatigue due to loading and unloading of the components are carried by semi-automation in which the involvement of the operator was less compared to manually operated machines. The improvement of productivity was achieved by changing the work design from manual loading to semi-automatic loading, which is discussed in the further paragraphs. Semi-automation reduced the workload of an operator, resulting in a reduction of operator fatigue and improvement in the organization’s productivity. Also, it increased the comfort of the operators. In different areas of this auto-ancillary industry, such as in the compressor wheel machine shop, loading and unloading components are done manually by the operator in between two machines, where the operator needs to walk more times between these machines. This movement causes stress in operators and a possibility of human error by improper clamping of the component leading to misalignment or damage to the component that affects the organization’s production. Thus, to avoid the above scenario, the pick and place robot with a gantry-type semi-automated loading device is introduced. The operator will load the component in the machine, and further process will be done by automation. The finished component will be unloaded automatically to the inspection operator leads to an increase in productivity. This semi-automated gantry machine that is placed horizontally in the organization reduces the cycle time/component from 90 seconds to 60 seconds; output/shift is increased from 320 to 480 components, improving productivity. Also, operator utilization is reduced from two persons to one person to perform a single task and reduced operator fatigue from 100% to 40%, as shown in Figure 7.
Applications of an interaction, process, integration and intelligence (IPII) design approach for ergonomics solutions
Published in Ergonomics, 2019
Wei Xu, Dov Furie, Manjunath Mahabhaleshwar, Bala Suresh, Hardev Chouhan
The user participatory design methods and the IPII Process Design work also provided insights into the IPII Intelligence Design work (see Figure 4 and Table 6). During the process design, each activity was classified as ‘full automation’, ‘semi-automation’ and ‘human operation’. The results helped determine the appropriate functional allocations between human and machine, which would minimise the human operator’s workload through machines’ intelligence and automation. Table 9 shows an example of the mapping between process steps and the functional allocation between humans and machines.