Human visual inspection skills remain superior for ensuring product quality and conformance to standards in the manufacturing industry. However, at present these skills cannot be formally shared with other workers or used to develop and implement new solutions or assistive technologies because they involve a high level of tacit knowledge which only exists in skilled operators' internal cognitions. Industry needs reliable methods for the capture and analysis of this tacit knowledge so that it can be shared and not lost but also so that it can be best utilised in the transfer of manual work to automated systems and introduction of new technologies and processes. This paper describes two UK manufacturing case studies that applied systematic task analysis methods to capture and scrutinise the tacit knowledge and skills being applied in the visual inspection of aerospace components. Results reveal that the method was effective in eliciting tacit knowledge, and showed that tacit skills are particularly needed when visual inspection standards lack specification or the task requires greater subjective interpretation. The implications of these findings for future research and for developments in the manufacturing industry are discussed.
It is going to be increasingly important for manufacturing system designers to incorporate human activity data and ergonomic analysis with other performance data in digital design modelling and system monitoring. However, traditional methods of capturing human activity data are not sufficiently accurate to meet the needs of digitised data analysis; qualitative data is subject to bias and imprecision and optically derived data is hindered by occlusions caused by structures or other people in a working environment. Therefore, to meet contemporary needs for more accurate and objective data, inertial non-optical methods of measurement appear to offer a solution. This paper describes a case study conducted within the aerospace manufacturing industry, where data on the human activities involved in aircraft wing systems installations was first collected via traditional ethnographic methods and found to have limited accuracy and
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