Application of a Virtual Reality and an Ergonomics Framework for Production Time Optimization: Case study in pen production

The goal of an efficient workstation design is to minimize the stress on the users by eliminating the risk of fatigue and injury, and consequently improve the production time. The primary goal of this research is to study and establish a relation between Ergonomics, Time Study, and Virtual Reality techniques for developing an integrated approach for designing and evaluating of assembly workstations. This proposed integrated approach is applied to improve the design of common storage bins which are being used in workstations for storage in repetitive manual assembly processes, in order to decrease the production time, reduce the fatigue on worker, mitigate the risk of Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders, and consequently improve the productivity. The objective of this research is to improve the design of a common storage bin used to hold the four parts in the assembly process of pen production. However, these days most of pen production assembly lines are automated, but in small and medium size enterprises this assembly process is still performed manually. Since this assembly task is simple and can be generalized to any other assembly task, therefore it is chosen as a case study. The participants in this experimental study are 10 people, 5 men and 5 women. The average age, body weight, and stature of the participants is 32.6 years, 181.4 cm, and 79.7 for males; and 32.8 years, 166.6 cm, 69.6 kg for females. Their age is between 24 to 43 years. A digital camera is used to record the real time experiments. Proplanner Software is used for Time study and observing experiments. DELMIA Human Activity Analysis is used to study the fatigue in virtual environment. The comparison of the real time and simulation experimental results show that the proposed storage bin could improve the time for pick-up of 30 parts by about 11.5 seconds and decreases the fatigue by 42.5%. It is demonstrated that the redesign of a common storage bin based on proposed technique improves the productivity and efficiency of the workstation.