Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 4508: Concept and Evaluation of a Method for the Integration of Human Factors into Human-Oriented Work Design in Cyber-Physical Production Systems (Sustainability)

Due to the shift from mainly manual labor to an increased portion of cognitive tasksin manufacturing caused by the introduction of cyber-physical systems, there is a need for anupdated collection of adequate design principles for user interfaces between humans and machines.Thus, we developed a method for the determination and evaluation of such design principles.It is based on human factors methods and facilitates the assessment of specific work design elementswhich are supposed to have a significant effect on work performance and the perception of workin cyber-physical production systems (CPPS). Within the application of the developed method,we derived an overview of key design elements in CPPS, developed an experimental platform,and conducted two empirical studies with a total of n = 68 participants. This way, three designelements were investigated, and the findings transferred into preliminary design principles. We canstate that the method can be used both for a better understanding of the mechanisms between humanfactors and work in CPPS. Besides, it helps to provide a catalogue of design principles applicable toSMEs to promote more efficient and successful integration of workers into CPPS.