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The planning and optimization of human-centered workplaces requires new methodology, which allows the integration of Exoskeletons as a new manufacturing resource or working tool for overcome enormous ergonomics problems when manipulating heavy parts or working over the head. The paper presents the first steps in developing an innovative approach for planning and optimization of smart workplaces with integrated adaptive Exoskeleton. The addressed theme harmonizes three main research areas: a) production technologies and holistic planning of manufacturing processes; b) ergonomics, safety and security of workers in manufacturing environments and c) the component-based configuration of the new type of wearable robotics, Exoskeletons.

The Digital Twins of product and production face the challenge that once the development process is closed, they does not reflect the real status of production where events as equipment failures, poor quality or missing compound parts happens continuously. For assuring production resilience a holistic methodology, combining a top-down with a bottom-up 3D scanning approach for capturing real-time production parameters and embedding them in Digital Twins is developed. The paper presents the methodology and a motivation scenario for further validation in an innovative set-up of an automated measurement cell, where state-of-the-at technologies as autonomous AGV, mobile 3D laser scanning and automated processes are integrated.

Workers are key enablers of flexibility and productivity in Manufacturing, especially in processes where full automation is not feasible. Such workplaces are often characterized by manual manipulation of heavy loads, hazardous conditions and high level of vibrations. Exoskeletons, fusing flexibility, intelligence and human-centered control with the high payload, endurance, precision and sensor-based guidance represent enabling technologies to cope this challenge. In this paper critical parameters for the evaluation of exoskeleton-centered workplaces are identified, as core elements of the methodology for evaluating the exoskeleton-centered workplaces. Comprehensive modelling, simulation and analysis of ergonomics and process parameters represent the foundations of the methodology.

The Exoskeleton represents a promising technology to equip manufacturing workplaces characterized by poor ergonomics, safety and security. Before this technology can be experimented and employed in operational manufacturing environments, the benefits should be highlighted in digital world at the holistic, process, workplace, line and production area levels, with focus on human work conditions. The development of the Digital Twins of Exoskeleton-centered workplaces faces the challenge of approaching the manual assembly and logistics processes as performed by hybrid resources: workers wearing Exoskeletons. From here, the coupling of an Exoskeleton to the digital worker and the realization of the Exoskeleton-Worker Digital Twin requires a thorough understanding of the human models and of wearable robotics, especially Exoskeleton design principles. A coupling methodology was developed and the prototype of the Digital Twins coupled with a commercial Exoskeleton was validated in automotive and logistics industries. The paper presents the performed research for: a) the optimization of the coupling process; b) the modification of the simulation parameters; and c) the embedding of the active Exoskeleton controller to a production and ergonomic simulation software.

The employment of intelligent tools in production, such as the new area of wearable robotics, the Exoskeletons, represents valuable and promising technology to reduce the physical stress and increase innovation, productivity and workplace safety. The challenge of realizing these advanced manufacturing environments with integrated Exoskeletons is represented by missing design and planning methods required to equip future workplaces with this enabling technology. The integration of Exoskeletons in logistics and production activities creates a new hybrid type of workstation that has to be designed according to a scientific approach. The article presents the first steps in developing an innovative approach to planning and optimizing intelligent working environments with integrated adaptive Exoskeletons. The topic harmonizes three main areas of research: a) production technologies and holistic planning of production processes; b) ergonomics, safety and security of workers in production environments and c) configuration based on the components of the new type of wearable robotics, the Exoskeletons. The validation of this approach is provided through the creation of digital human/Exoskeleton models combining digital Exoskeleton with various digital human models. The Digital Twin of the human/Exoskeleton system is the heart of a holistic design and optimization process that aims to assess the appropriateness of the selected Exoskeleton by simulating the tasks performed and adapting the simulation parameters. An exemplary validation case in one of the most innovative and dynamic sector, the construction sector, demonstrates the applicability of the model. A guideline for migrate the model in other industry sectors is provided, as well.

Global competition, rapid market changes and the need for more and faster innovations lead to a new risk situation for manufacturing companies. As dynamics increase due to the Digital Transformation, the reliability of success forecasts decreases and many of the product design innovations launched on the market fail. Manufacturing companies, which design products down to the last detail and then develop them over a long period of time and with high investments are highly likely to find that their product will not be accepted on the market. To reduce this risk, agile processes and iterative product design is useful. This approach is based on multiple, iterative tests with customers and the possibility of implementing the knowledge gained. It is important to constantly check, whether the products meet the demand of the market and to design the product in such a variable way, that changes can be taken up immediately and learning effects can be implemented. The Lean-Startup approach is based on these principles. It has been established as a way of thinking for startups and young High-Tech companies who want to optimize their initial market approach through iterative testing of prototypes and continuous improvement through learning. However, the Lean-Startup approach is also suitable for larger companies, which want to make their product development more agile and flexible. This enables companies to react more flexibel to external influences, such as market competition, technologies and politics and to integrate customer needs are more effectively into the product design process. This constant monitoring of the product market fit reduces the risk of developing past the market. This paper introduces an approach for migrating the Lean-Startup approach to large manufacturing companies.

Due to highly competitive markets, constantly shifting consumer requirements, and technological advances, product families are continuously evolving over time. This product evolution leads to new part variants being added to the existing part mix. When at a future time the manufacturing system is not capable, as is or in a reconFigured state, to manufacture the evolved part variants, then this has negative consequences on business performance. This phenomena is being termed as disruptive product evolution. Due to complex interdependencies, incomplete information and uncertainty in manufacturing requirements this phenomena leads to a wicked problem. In order to tame such a wicked problem, this paper contributes and evaluates a knowledge-based decision-making approach that supports manufacturing system designers in exploring the interplay between business strategy, evolving product range and manufacturing systems. A prototype digital factory tool based on this approach has been developed and evaluated. The encouraging results obtained have shown that this research paves the way for the development and integration of such knowledge-based decision-making approaches within state of the art digital factory tools.

The European manufacturing sectors have to face the challenge of workplace safety and security representing costs up to 4% of GNP. A user-friendly and cooperative human-robotic exoskeleton for manual handling work can represent a possible innovative solution. For highlighting and revealing the benefits of human-robotic exoskeleton, represented by increased employment and productivity and reduced back injuries, the validation of this concept in digital and virtual environment has been performed, in two relevant industry sectors, car disassembly and automotive suppliers. The digital models of the test cases and the simulation of ergonomic workplaces were realized by using state-of-the-art Digital Manufacturing technologies and systems. This simulation technology allowed the realization of two states of factory environment, the “as-is” state without an exoskeleton and the to-be state after employing the use of an exoskeleton. The challenges of coupling the exoskeleton to the human operators in Digital Manufacturing Systems, the first results and the next steps, are presented as well.

The employment of Exoskeletons for manual handling work in manufacturing industries aims at increased employment, productivity, safety and security at workplace. This paper highlights several challenges, current results and future steps of our work in optimization of Exoskeleton-based factory environments. “JackEx” is the enhancement of the standard digital humanoid “Jack” with concepts and elements of passive Exoskeletons. For the development of JackEx, a new digital manufacturing resource, the intimate coupling of the Exoskeleton digital model to the humanoid “Jack” components was realized. First the CAD model of the Exoskeleton was decomposed in its elementary compound parts, by creating its corresponding kinematic model. As the next step, the coupling of Exoskeleton digital models to the humanoid was a real challenge since the humanoid and Exoskeleton kinematics are heterogeneous and autonomous. In order to define a common kinematic model of humanoid with integrated Exoskeleton, complex calculus and tests were performed resulting in a new kinematic model. JackEx was deeper validated in a virtual and digital environment through real test cases simulations. The comparison between the simulation results with those performed for the same task but without integrated Exoskeleton, revealed from an ergonomically perspective the benefits of employing the Exoskeleton in manufacturing factories.

This article presents a holistic methodology for planning, optimization and integration of exoskeletons for human-centered workplaces, with a focus on the automotive industry. Parts of current and future challenges in this industry (i.e., need of flexible manufacturing but as well having demographic change) are the motivation for this article. This challenges should be transformed in positive effectiveness by integrating of exoskeletons regarding this article. Already published research work from authors are combined in a form of summary, to get all relevant knowledge, and especially results, in a coherent and final context. This article gives interested newcomers, as well as experienced users, planners and researchers, in exoskeleton technology an overview and guideline of all relevant parts: from absolute basics beginning until operative usage. After fixing the motivation with resulting three relevant research questions, an introduction to the exoskeleton technology and to the current challenges in planning and optimizing the ergonomics and efficiency in manufacturing are given. A first preselection method (called ExoMatch) is presented to find the most suitable exoskeleton for workplacesm by filtering and matching all the important analyzed attributes and characteristics under consideration to all relevant aspects from environments. The next section treats results regarding an analysis of influencing factors by integrating exoskeletons in manufacturing. In particular, ergonomic-related and production-process-related (especially time-management) influences identified and researched in already published works are discussed. The next important step is to present a roadmap as a guideline for integration exoskeleton. This article gives relevant knowledge, methodologies and guidelines for optimized integrating exoskeleton for human-centered workplaces, under consideration of ergonomics- and process-related influences, in a coherent context, as a result and summary from several already published research work.

Exoskeletons aim to improve workplace conditions in industry. The main objective is to optimize actual ergonomic situations. Additional expected positive benefits are to raise quality, flexibility and productivity. There are many attributes, depending on workplace and environmental conditions that have to be considered for the integration and employment of Exoskeletons in production. The requirements of Exoskeletons, a definition and the adjustments for smart and adaptive Exoskeletons will be presented in this paper. The new method ExoMatch presented here is an innovative approach to combine the complex context of workplaces and Exoskeletons in a schematic and process-related line of action. The aim is to support the decision of finding the most suitable Exoskeleton for different working situations, to close the scientific gap by filling the previous manual and personal-depending approach with a novel procedural objective, and a flexible automated approach. To structure all important attributes, a pre-assessment procedure, ExoScore and a preselection-method, ExoMatch of the most suitable Exoskeleton, there is a need of managing all available Exoskeletons and the specific workplaces (ExoData and UseCaseData). The conclusions are followed by an outlook of future work and required methods for planning, assess, objectify and migrate the Exoskeletons in industry.

In the traditional software development cycle, requirements gathering is considered the most critical phase. Getting the requirements right first time has become a dogma in software engineering because the correction of erroneous or incomplete requirements in later software development phases becomes overly expensive. For product-service systems (PSS), this dogma and standard requirements engineering (RE) approaches are not appropriate because classical RE is considered concluded, once a product service is delivered. For PSS it is impossible to foresee all future context conditions and customization needs customers may come up with after product deployment. In addition, the services supporting a complex hardware-software product depend on the individual product configuration a customer requires. For example, when a standard laser machine is equipped with one or more special sensors, new services may be needed that depend on sensor data from these new sources combined with other data generated by the standard machine configuration. Thus, we claim that RE needs to be extended to the deployment phase of a product and an agile approach is required to cope with emerging hardware and software requirements as a PSS is marketed. In this paper, a novel view-based model-driven engineering approach is proposed that enables collaborative product-service design and customization and copes with evolving, incomplete and unforeseen requirements. A prototype has been implemented as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) and is currently validated on four industrial pilot cases as part of the H2020 project ICP4Life.

Changing production systems and product requirements can trace their origin in volatile customer behaviour and evolving product requirements. This dynamic nature of customer requirements has been described as a constantly moving target, thus presenting a significant challenge for several aspects of product development. To deal with this constant and sometimes unpredictable product evolution, cyber physical production systems (CPPS) that employ condition monitoring, self-awareness and reconfigurability principles, have to be designed and implemented. This research contributes a CPPS design approach that proactively provides the required CPPS design knowledge. This approach aims to minimise or avoids future consequences and disruptions on the CPPS. This knowledge needs to be provided at the right time whilst not being intrusive to the production system designer's cognitive activity. To effectively deal with the complexity of the cyber physical production system design activity with a manual method would lead to a time consuming, and complex support tool which is hard to implement, and difficult to use. The CPPS design approach has therefore been implemented in a prototype digital factory tool. This paper describes in detail the system requirements and system architecture for this tool. In order to establish the effectiveness of the proposed approach for designing cyber physical production systems, the prototype digital factory tool has been evaluated with a case study and a number of semi-structured interviews with both industrial and scientific stakeholders. The encouraging results obtained from this research evaluation have shown that such an approach for supporting the CPPS design activity makes stakeholders aware of their decision consequences and is useful in practice. This result can lead the way for the development and integration of such knowledge-based decision-making approaches within state-of-the-art digital factory and Computer Aided Engineering Design (CAED) tools.