Simulation of human-oriented production systems considering workers' cooperation

The needs of customers with regard to manufactured products are likely to continue becoming more diverse. One way to handle the diverse requirements of individual customers is configuration to order (CTO) and the only way to make this a reality is to shift to extremely diverse, small-lot manufacturing. In the general shift from mass production to highly diverse, small-lot production, human-oriented production processes such as U-lines and manufacturing cells have been utilized to increasing effect. This success is due to using human abilities such as "cooperation" to give the production process a great deal of flexibility. In order to bring to reality the extremely diverse, small-lot manufacturing systems that can make configuration to order a reality it is desirable to construct human-oriented production processes that are both worker-friendly and make good use of the workers' abilities. For that reason, there is a demand for ways of quantitatively evaluating cooperation and other human factors in the manufacturing process. The present research has modeled the cooperative behavior of autonomous people in a human oriented production process, applied the cooperation model to production simulation, and evaluated it.