Maria Chiara Leva

The Human Factors contribution in the scope of the industrial process optimization presented in t...his case study had to deal with considerations regarding the physical and mental workload requirements of different workstations and the capabilities of the operators assigned to them. The scope was to provide the industrial management with a better way to allocate human resources to tasks requiring different operational skills.

Design documentation, safety and security analysis, environmental studies, studies on organizatio...nal factors, product characterization, etc., constitute the knowledge base each process plant, with a higher or lower detail, uses for plant management.

This paper presents the initial framework adopted to assess human error in assembly tasks at a la...rge manufacturing company in Ireland. The model to characterize and predict human error presented in this paper is linked conceptually to the model introduced by Rasch (1980), where the probability of a specified outcome is modelled as a logistic function of the difference between the person capacity and item difficulty.

Nowadays the majority of organizations operating in manufacturing field recognize the importance ...of including the Human Factor contribution in the industrial process optimization (Hong et al. 2007).

The increasing level of automation and complexity in the automotive industry has led to the establishment of a work environment, where human machine interface and human reliability are becoming critical factors of performance especially for safety critical tasks. Many different methodologies for performing risk assessment considering human factors are already available in the literature, but they were often developed for domains other than the automotive industry (aviation, nuclear and process industry).