Future trends in human work area design for cyber-physical production systems

Currently, there is an ongoing transformation of classical products and machinery towards cyber-physical systems. Main features of these systems are the real-time data exchange between various technical and computational elements enabled by communication technologies and data processing ability provided by embedded systems. In the area of manufacturing, this trend boosts the development of cyber-physical production systems (CPPS). They enable the optimization of control processes, for example by autonomous decision-making, computational assistant systems for workers, or an extended human-machine collaboration. Subsequently, this increased computerization and automation provokes changes for human work in manufacturing. Following leading experts, the factories of the future will provide less easy and repetitive but more advanced and complex tasks. This trend changes the way how human factors or human-machine interaction influence the design of manufacturing systems. In order to achieve the promised productivity gains created by CPPS, these human-related topics have to be considered and included into the technical and organizational development of CPPS. As a starting point, a detailed view on remaining and newly added human tasks in CPPS is necessary. In this paper, we provide a listing of human task areas in existing and future CPPS. In this regard, we provide a trend estimation on the decline, rise, or further change of these tasks. The results can be used to facilitate the integration of human factors in the design of CPPS. We carry out our work by firstly deriving a standard listing of tasks for a generalized manufacturing system. Secondly, we combine the findings with expert judgments regarding CPPS trends and recent employment data from the German job market. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.