Interactive production planning and ergonomic assessment with Digital Human Models--introducing the Editor for Manual Work Activities (ema)

The aging workforce is a risk factor for manufacturing industries that contain many jobs with high physical workloads. Thus, ergonomic risk factors have to be avoided in early phases of production planning. This paper introduces a new tool for simulating manual work activities with 3D human models, the so-called emaΦ. For the most part, the emaΦ software is based on a unique modular approach including a number of complex operations that were theoretically developed and empirically validated by means of motion capturing technologies. Using these modules for defining the digital work process enables the production planner to compile human simulations more accurately and much quicker compared to any of the existing modeling tools. Features of the emaΦ software implementation, such as ergonomic evaluation and MTM-time analyses, and the workflow for practical application are presented.