Simulation of industrial man-machine systems

In the design of large industrial processes, ergonomics designers can benefit from the use of computer simulation of man/machine systems when on-site studies are too risky or costly and laboratory studies alone have questionable generalization. This paper provides an illustration of this methodology for a hot strip mill in the steel industry and a demonstration of ergonomic design applications. A special simulation package which was developed for small military systems was adapted to this large industrial case and applied to an older manually-controlled mill of the 1930s. The simulation model was then modified to reflect automation and manning changes found in the mills built in the 1950s and the simulation results verified the actual performance differences between these mills. Experiments in further design and manning changes were made in order to demonstrate the usefulness of simulation as a design-aiding technique.