Human-centred Assembly: A Case Study for an Anthropocentric Cyber-physical System

To engineer the factory of the future the paper argues for an anthropocentric cyber-physical reference model that assimilate in an integrated, dynamic, structural and functional way all the required components (i.e. physical, computational and human) of a synthetic hybrid system. This is due to the real need to design large-scale complex systems that accommodate the latest achievements in factory automation where the human is not merely playing a simple and clear role inside the control-loop, but is becoming a composite factor in a highly automated system (“man-in-the-mesh”). The concept is demonstrated by instantiating our anthropocentric cyber-physical reference model in a concrete case study, dealing with the cognition augmentation of the human operator in a manual assembly workstation.