The incorporation of virtual ergonomics to improve the occupational safety condition in a factory

Abstract

Proper manual material handling (MMH) is the important step leading to the occupational safety of the workers on the shop floor as well as the productivity improvement of the manufacturing process. The objectives of this study are the application of different risk assessment methods, the redesign of the workstation to reduce the occupational risk and the utilization of software package to validate the proposed interventions. As a result, an assembly line of a product is selected as the case study to validate the proposed agenda. Afterwards, four lifting assessment methods, i.e. NIOSH lift equation, Snook Psychophysical Table, OSU Lift guidelines and ACGIH/TLV, are used to assess the hazard risk in the assembly line. After these methods are performed, the results are introduced to recommend the newly designed working conditions, i.e. postures, movements and the barriers. To validate the improved design, new configurations are simulated by the virtual ergonomic program and the ergonomic analysis is performed. The important results, e.g. low back compression and percent of population capable, are calculated by the software to determine the appropriate values which are used as the guidelines for a safe working condition. Moreover, the manufacturing process is also simulated to improve that the ergonomic redesign of the shop floor environment and another consequence of the implementation leads to the significant increase of the productivity.