Automation and decision support in interactive consumer products

This article presents two empirical studies (n = 30, n = 48) that are concerned with different forms of automation in interactive consumer products. The goal of the studies was to evaluate the effectiveness of two types of automation: perceptual augmentation (i.e. supporting users' information acquisition and analysis); and control integration (i.e. supporting users' action selection and implementation). Furthermore, the effectiveness of on-product information (i.e. labels attached to product) in supporting automation design was evaluated. The findings suggested greater benefits for automation in control integration than in perceptual augmentation alone, which may be partly due to the specific requirements of consumer product usage. If employed appropriately, on-product information can be a helpful means of information conveyance. The article discusses the implications of automation design in interactive consumer products while drawing on automation models from the work environment.     

Integrating techniques and tools for testing automation

This article presents two tools to generate test cases, one for Java programs and one for .NET programs, as well as a structured testing process whereby such tools can be used in order to help in process automation. The main innovation in this work is the joint use of diverse techniques and technologies, which have been separately applied to test automation: reflection to extract the class structure; regular expressions to describe test templates and test cases; JUnit and NUnit as test case execution frameworks; mutation and MuJava as test case quality measurers; serialization to deal with the parameters of complex data types; and once more, reflection, to facilitate the test engineer in the task of writing the oracle. Finally, the article presents an experiment carried out to validate the work. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Automation and decision support in interactive consumer products

This article presents two empirical studies (n = 30, n = 48) that are concerned with different forms of automation in interactive consumer products. The goal of the studies was to evaluate the effectiveness of two types of automation: perceptual augmentation (i.e. supporting users' information acquisition and analysis); and control integration (i.e. supporting users' action selection and implementation). Furthermore, the effectiveness of on-product information (i.e. labels attached to product) in supporting automation design was evaluated. The findings suggested greater benefits for automation in control integration than in perceptual augmentation alone, which may be partly due to the specific requirements of consumer product usage. If employed appropriately, on-product information can be a helpful means of information conveyance. The article discusses the implications of automation design in interactive consumer products while drawing on automation models from the work environment.     

Adapting automation to man, culture and society

Anxiety about the effects of automation on workers and society is at least 150 years old. The recent explosion of microelectronics and robotic applications has sharpened our understanding of both the gains and the risks: mismatch to human physiological, psychological and cultural characteristics; alienation from fulfillment and dignity in work; widening of the gap between skilled and unskilled workers and between technologically developed and underdeveloped communities; decrement in individual security. Attention to these problems can ensure that automation results in a better society. The control engineer, who is responsible for enlarging the scale of automation, should also play a role in adapting it to people. For the time being, technology should be individually designed to each culture.     

The impact of absenteeism on the quality of assembly line production: The importance of a specialization requirement

Absenteeism among manual workers is without doubt one of the most significant factors that affect the functioning of assembly lines. It is a widely held view that high levels of absenteeism have negative repercussions on the quality and costs of operations. According to the scientific theory of work, workers who temporarily stand in for their absent colleagues affect production quality levels because of a lack of work specialization and experience. However, new and sophisticated automation can eliminate the effect of absenteeism on assembly line production. This article gathered more than 960,000 products produced by different levels of absenteeism. The effects of absenteeism on the quality of products in assembly lines over the course of one year were analyzed. In contrast to established thinking, the empirical evidence presented here confirms that absenteeism does not always produce problems in the quality of products. This evidence can be explained by the need for specialization among manual workers has been reduced by the invention of more sophisticated and specialized machinery. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

J2ME平台结构及开发应用

随着Java技术的不断发展,应用范围不断扩大,Jaya在无线领域应用中出现了J2ME。介绍了J2ME的基本结构、以及J2ME中MIDP API的分类及功能、怎样编写J2ME的应用程序,同时还介绍了两种J2ME开发平台的建立。     

基于PID控制算法的变电站用锄草机器人设计

目前,国内的变电站内锄草作业主要靠人工完成,锄草质量受锄草工人技术的娴熟程度影响明显。此外在锄草过程中,锄草工人有可能会由于自身不小心造成与变电站内的高压设备产生接触,有人身触电的风险,由此可见锄草自动化势在必行。本文结合国内外锄草机器人的研究现状,阐述了研发此款锄草机器人的目的和现实意义;通过对LEGO（乐高）模块组装锄草机器人的可行性进行分析论证后,对锄草机器人的结构进行了设计;对锄草机器人的锄草轨迹进行了规划设计,实现了半圆曲面和平面的锄草移动作业,并对机器人小车不规则曲线的运动轨迹采用PID控制算法进行了设计。     

基于Connect ME的油田远程监控系统的设计

针对油田特殊地域环境引发的通信设备铺设难度大、稳定性差、现场作业危险等问题,为实现油井数据的自动采集与标准化传输,设计了一套基于Connect ME模块的油田远程智能监控系统.Connect ME模块完成了串口到以太网的数据转发,为现场设备提供了以太网通信接口.同时在LabWindows/CVI下开发了系统远程监控平台...     

Caregivers’ attitudes toward potential robot coworkers in elder care

Technological advances in robotics increase progressively. Elder care is one of the work areas which have potential to involve robotic workforce. So, it is important to focus on interaction between humans and potential robot workers to prepare the organization for possible challenges. The current study examined the relationships between trust in robots and anthropomorphism of robots, intention to work with robots and preference of automation levels. For this purpose, 102 caregivers who work for elder care in a nursing home (aged between 19 and 40) participated in an experimental study. According to the results, anthropomorphism of robots did not make any difference in terms of trust in them. Trust in robots was significantly related to intention to work and preference of automation levels. Organizations may consider employees’ trust in robots as an important factor before adapting them to workplace area.

     

Assessment of the automation potential of electric vehicle battery disassembly

Electric vehicles (EV) offer an environment friendly solution to transportation and there are predictions for high sales of EVs in future. The most expensive parts of those vehicles are their batteries which need to be recycled after use. Currently, there are major challenges in disassembling and recycling EV batteries due to the large variety of types, sizes and design complexity. This paper provides a brief summary on current studies for the disassembly of EV batteries as well as the assessment of automation potential for EV battery disassembly steps. A 2017 Chevrolet Bolt battery was used to generate a disassembly graph, which shows connections and constraints of all parts and fasteners, and a 46-step disassembly sequence. An automation assessment of the 2017 Chevrolet Bolt battery and Audi Q5 battery was conducted on all the steps to determine, based on two categories, the technical possibility and the necessity of automating a given disassembly step. To score these different steps, which could range from a -100 to 100, an easy-to-use criteria catalog was developed and applied on these batteries. This criteria catalog consisted of a total of ten criteria, five criteria for the technical possibility to automate the step and five criteria for the necessity to automate that step. Disassembly steps that score above 50 for the technical ability to automate and had a positive necessity of automating score are steps that should be automated. The scores generated for both batteries showed that most of the unscrewing operations should be automated while most of the lifting operations should be performed by human workers. The results from the automation assessment of the Audi Q5 battery compared similarly to approaches found in literature but was able to produce more extreme scorings because of the simplified criteria catalog. The work presented in this paper gives an approach to assess the automation potential of a given disassembly step in any EV battery.     

Influence of shift work in process industry on workers' occupational health,productivity, and family and social life: An ergonomic approach

Shift work is a major feature of modern work practices. It involves working at times considered unconventional for most workers, such as at night. Although the community often benefits from such work practices, shift work can be hazardous for both the workers and the community. There are increased risks for accidents and errors, increased sleepiness and fatigue due to difficulties sleeping, increased health problems, and disruptions to family and social life. More shift workers complained of sleep disturbance, poor sleep quality, tiredness at awakening, and sleepiness in work than did non‐shift workers. More shift workers also complained of gastrointestinal disturbances than did non‐shift workers. The aim of this article is to provide general information on shift work, work schedules, and the effects of work schedules on sleep, fatigue, performance, the health of the human operator, and productivity. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Mobility at work: A typology of mobile communities of practice and contextual ambidexterity

Innovations in mobile technology shape how mobile workers share knowledge and collaborate on the go. We introduce mobile communities of practice (MCOPs) as a lens for understanding how these workers self-organize, and present three MCOP case studies. Working from contextual ambidexterity, we develop a typology of bureaucratic, anarchic, idiosyncratic and adhocratic MCOPs. We discuss how variations in the degree of organizational alignment and individual discretion shape the extent to which these types explore and exploit mobile work practices and approach organizational ambidexterity. This article concludes with important strategic implications for managing mobile work and practical considerations for identifying, creating, and supporting MCOPs.     

Effect of Job Rotation Types on Productivity,Accident Rate,and Satisfaction in the Automotive Assembly Line Workers

This study investigates different autonomous job rotation types to analyze their impacts on productivity, accident rate, and worker's satisfaction. The subjects of research were 422 assembly‐line units in 3 production plants from an automobile company. The preferred rotation types and workers’ satisfaction scores in the 422 units were surveyed by the average worker's experience and work productivity, quality and accident rate scores were traced over a 5‐year period. Results showed that workers with little work experience preferred to work in shorter cycles composed of a small variety of tasks, whereas workers with more experience preferred longer cycles composed of a larger variety of tasks. In addition, autonomously chosen rotation systems proved to boost productivity and work satisfaction when compared to units that did not implement job rotation. In contrast, only 4 out of 10 rotation types showed improvements in decreased number of accidents. Of the 10 rotation types, ones with daily cycles with a small range of tasks and weekly cycles with a wide range of tasks displayed the most promising results for productivity, work satisfaction, and accident prevention. This study implies that the preferred types of rotation do not necessarily lead to higher productivity, safety, and satisfaction. The results of this study are expected to serve as a basic guideline for job design.     

Human factors in the guidance of uninhabited vehicles: oxymoron or tautology?

Today’s automation is typically tied into work processes as tools actively supporting the human operator in fulfilling certain well-defined sub-tasks. The human operator is in the role of the high-end decision component determining and supervising the work process. With emergent technology highly automated work systems can be beneficial on the one hand, but automation may as well cause problems on its own. A new way of introducing automation into work systems shall be advocated by this article overcoming the classical pitfalls of automation and simultaneously taking the benefit as wanted. This shall be achieved by so-called cognitive automation, i.e. providing human-like problem-solving, decision-making and knowledge processing capabilities to machines in order to obtain goal-directed behaviour and effective operator assistance. A key feature of cognitive automation is the ability to create its own comprehensive representation of the current situation and to provide reasonable action. By additionally providing full knowledge of the prime work objectives to the automation it will be enabled to co-operate with the human operator in supervision and decision tasks, then being intelligent machine assistants for the human operator in his work place. Such assistant systems understand the work objective and will be heading for the achievement of the overall desired work result. They will understand the situation (e.g. opportunities, conflicts) and actions of team members—whether humans or assistant systems—and will pursue goals for co-operation and co-ordination (e.g. task coverage, avoidance of redundancy or team member overcharge). On the other hand, cognitive automation can be emerged towards being highly automated intelligent agents in charge of certain supportive tasks to be performed in a semi-autonomous mode. These cognitive semi-autonomous systems and the cognitive assistants shall be denoted as the two faces of dual-mode cognitive automation (Onken and Schulte, in preparation).     

Three dimensions of group work: Cooperation,participation and autonomy at German workplaces

We have carried out a representative survey among more than 1,600 workers, salaried employees and civil servants in industry, services sector and public service asking about types of cooperation in the work process. We have been able to identify eight different work organizations which can be described by the three dimensions of cooperation, participation and autonomy. In all, 6.9% of German employees work according to the organizational principle of group work. However, it is possible to distinguish very different types of group work regarding the group members' opportunities for autonomy and participation.This article is based on a research report written by Matthias Kleinsschmidt and Ulrich Pekruhl: Kooperative Arbeitsstrkturen and Gruppenarbeit in Deutschland. Ergebnisse einer repräsentativien Beschäftigtenbefragung. IAT Strukturberichterstattung 01, Gelsenkirchen 1994.     

A Study on Automatic Classification of Users’ Desktop Interactions

Knowledge workers frequently change activities, either by choice or through interruptions. With an increasing number of activities and activity switches, it is becoming more and more difficult for knowledge workers to keep track of their desktop activities. This article presents our efforts to achieve activity awareness through automatic classification of user's everyday desktop activities. For getting a deeper understanding, we investigate performance of various classifiers with respect to discriminative power of time-, interaction-, and content-based feature sets for different work scenarios and users. Specifically, by viewing an activity as a sequence of desktop interactions we present (1) a methodology for translating a user's desktop interactions into activities, (2) evaluation of the discriminative power of different activity features and feature types, and (3) analysis of supervised classification models for classifying desktop activity under two different scenarios, i.e., an activity-centric scenario and a user-centric scenario. The experiments are carried out on a real-world dataset, and the results show satisfactory accuracy using relatively few and simple types of features.     

A knowledge-based system for the selection of appropriate work measurement techniques

As a result of technological advancements and telecommunication innovations the nature of work performed by all classes of workers has undergone drastic changes. This is evidenced by the increased automation of long-run, short-cycled manual work and the increased application of word processors and microcomputers in the office. These changes demand new and more structured approaches to measuring and controlling work. One such approach is the application of a knowledge-based system to select the most appropriate work measurement technique for determining the expected or “standard” task completion time, depending on the nature of the task.     

A theoretical framework for designing human-centered automotive automation systems

Increasingly sophisticated and robust automotive automation systems are being developed to be applied in all aspects of driving. Benefits, such as improving safety, task performance, and workload have been reported. However, several critical accidents involving automation assistance have also been reported. Although automation systems may work appropriately, human factors such as drivers errors, overtrust in and overreliance on automation due to lack of understanding of automation functionalities and limitations as well as distrust caused by automation surprises may trigger inappropriate human–automation interactions that lead to negative consequences. Several important methodologies and efforts for improving human–automation interactions follow the concept of human-centered automation, which claims that the human must have the final authority over the system, have been called. Given that the human-centered automation has been proposed as a more cooperative automation approach to reduce the likelihood of human–machine misunderstanding. This study argues that, especially in critical situations, the way control is handed over between agents can improve human–automation interactions even when the system has the final decision-making authority. As ways of improving human–automation interactions, the study proposes adaptive sharing of control that allows dynamic control distribution between human and system within the same level of automation while the human retains the final authority, and adaptive trading of control in which the control and authority shift between human and system dynamically while changing levels of automation. Authority and control transitions strategies are discussed, compared and clarified in terms of levels and types of automation. Finally, design aspects for determining how and when the control and authority can be shifted between human and automation are proposed with recommendations for future designs.

     

Work design and work measurement: implications for advanced production systems

With the increasing use of advanced automation technology, new approaches to work measurement are necessitated. The methodological needs for the research into development of a new generation of work measurement systems are examined, and a cognitive system engineering approach is adopted to take into account human behavior other than physical activity. It is proposed that the work measurement schemes for advanced production systems should be built around the cognitive characteristics of the workers and be compatible with their internal representational models of the given system.     

Explicit control of adaptive automation under different levels of environmental stress

This article examines the effectiveness of three different forms of explicit control of adaptive automation under low- and high-stress conditions, operationalised by different levels of noise. In total, 60 participants were assigned to one of three types of automation design (free, prompted and forced choice). They were trained for 4?h on a highly automated simulation of a process control environment, called AutoCAMS. This was followed by a 4-h testing session under noise exposure and quiet conditions. Measures of performance, psychophysiology and subjective reactions were taken. The results showed that all three modes of explicit control of adaptive automation modes were able to attenuate the negative effects of noise. This was partly due to the fact that operators opted for higher levels of automation under noise. It also emerged that forced choice showed marginal advantages over the two other automation modes. Statement of Relevance: This work is relevant to the design of adaptive automation since it emphasises the need to consider the impact of work-related stressors during task completion. During the presence of stressors, different forms of operator support through automation may be required than under more favourable working conditions.