Industry 5 and the Human in Human-Centric Manufacturing.

Industry 4 (I4) was a revolutionary new stage for technological progress in manufacturing which promised a new level of interconnectedness between a diverse range of technologies. Sensors, as a point technology, play an important role in these developments, facilitating human-machine interaction and enabling data collection for system-level technologies. Concerns for human labour working in I4 environments (e.

Using Worker Position Data for Human-Driven Decision Support in Labour-Intensive Manufacturing.

This paper provides a novel methodology for human-driven decision support for capacity allocation in labour-intensive manufacturing systems. In such systems (where output depends solely on human labour) it is essential that any changes aimed at improving productivity are informed by the workers' actual working practices, rather than attempting to implement strategies based on an idealised representation of a theoretical production process. This paper reports how worker position data (obtained by localisation sensors) can be used as input to process mining algorithms to generate a data-driven process model to understand how manufacturing tasks are actually performed and how this model can then be used to build a discrete event simulation to investigate the performance of capacity allocation adjustments made to the original working practice observed in the data.

Adaptive Manufacturing for Healthcare During the COVID-19 Emergency and Beyond.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, global health services have faced unprecedented demands. Many key workers in health and social care have experienced crippling shortages of personal protective equipment, and clinical engineers in hospitals have been severely stretched due to insufficient supplies of medical devices and equipment. Many engineers who normally work in other sectors have been redeployed to address the crisis, and they have rapidly improvised solutions to some of the challenges that emerged, using a combination of low-tech and cutting-edge methods.