INDUSTRIAL WORKSTATIONS DESIGN: A REAL CASE STUDY

The research work advances the effective design of the most criticai workstations belonging to a real industriai plant; to this end, the authors propose an approach based on the integration of Modeling & Simulation tools, several ergonomic standards and the most known work measurement tools. The Modeling and simulation lools allow to implement a three-dimensional environment capable of recreating, with satisfactory accuracy, the evolution over the time of the real workstations. The ergonomic standards consent to evaluate the ergonomic risks leve! within the system being considered. The work measurement tools permit to calculate the time required for performing ali the workstations operations. The effective design of the workstations is achieved by using the simulation model for comparing workstations' alternative configurations. The comparison is based on ergonomic and lime indexes related to the ergonomic standards and the work measurement tools. Such comparison allows lo choose the workstations fmal configurations