Today, assembly work systems have to meet high flexibility requirements. The variant assembly of different, often customer-specific products in changing batch sizes increases the complexity, especially for employees in manual assembly. Worker guidance systems are cognitive assistance systems that dynamically provide relevant and product-specific assembly information and thus support employees in flexible assembly. The design of these worker guidance systems can be divided into the fields of information level, information design and information device. Previous studies on worker guidance systems have essentially investigated the influence of the information device on assembly performance and accordingly discussed which hardware is best suited to display assembly information. The degree of information and information design have hardly been investigated in empirical studies to date, especially with regard to the effects of their design. In this context, models from the field of information systems show that successful implementation is achieved when both performance and individual assessment by the users are positively influenced.
The aim of this work is to analyze the effect of the design of worker guidance systems in terms of information level, information design and the compatibility of system and task on both assembly performance and user assessment. For this purpose, the concept of a screen-based worker guidance system is described in this thesis. Based on this system, different variants of the system are derived, which differ with regard to the mentioned design aspects. These are used in two empirical studies, a field study in an assembly company and a laboratory study under controlled but realistic conditions, for the assembly of products and are compared accordingly. In the studies, the complexity of the work task is also varied by manufacturing different products. In addition, individual factors of the test subjects are determined, assessing their affinity for technology and the self-assessment of technical and methodological competences.
The results show that a high level of information of the worker guidance system achieves better results, especially in the laboratory study with inexperienced test persons and in complex assembly tasks. In contrast, a low level of information shows partial advantages in the field study, as the company's highly trained assembly workers can assemble significantly faster with this. An intensive interaction design of the worker guidance system, which regularly presents important assembly results and demands confirmation, is suitable for further reducing the number of assembly errors, but is also associated with a potentially higher assembly time and a poorer experience of use. A lack of compatibility between assembly information in the system and the work task has no significant effect on assembly performance. The results of the field study also show a correlation between affinity for technology and experience of use. In the laboratory study, a negative correlation between the competence assessment of the test persons and their experience of use was demonstrated. Recommendations for the design of future worker guidance systems will be derived from the results. | English |