Ergonomic Design of Production Machines - Trends and Empirical Results

The requirements for the ergonomic design of user interfaces on production machines acquire an increasing importance in the context of »Industrie 4.0«. The trend of increasing technological complexity of machines mainly correlates with the integration of additional functions in machines. Increasing functionality of the machines leads to a cumulative number of control elements, which limits the clarity of the machine Operation and leads to higher cognitive demands in the machine operation. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate technological trends of the design of production machines. Based on this, the importance of ergonomics for production machines and concrete design recommendations with reference to study results of investigations on production machines are presented. The results of this study arose in the context of the research focus »ProErgo« (Ergonomic design of production machines in the context of the industry 4.0), which is funded by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany.