Human-Centered Design of Digital Assistance Systems in Smart Factories Based on Quality Function Deployment

Digital assistance systems getting more and more relevance for manufacturing and especially in variant-rich manual assembly. Due to increasing product complexity, the information flow during the assembly process are becoming increasingly complex. Therefor digital assistance systems will play an important role in the future by supporting employees and cooperating with them in order to increase productivity, quality, ergonomics and flexibility. Industrial Engineers and IT experts must design digital assistance systems in a joint process. Assistance systems must be designed based on user and process requirements and in such a way that they optimally support the abilities of the employees adaptively. When designing assistance systems today, however, the complexity of the planning task results in many obstacles that companies have to overcome. This paper presents a human-centered approach to the systematic analysis of assembly processes with the focus on user needs and desig n of digital assistance systems.