A conceptual approach for ergonomic design of inspection tasks

Abstract

Inspection tasks become more and more important for modern production and complex high reliability systems. A major particularity of inspection tasks is to be seen in the fact that the central work process cannot be observed externally. Although inspections tasks include physical activity, the inspection task itself is basically a perceptional and cognitive procedure. Due to the lack of accessibility of a 'work process' or an execution strategy it cannot be broken into separate work steps and cause-effect-relationships. Thus, common ergonomics intervention and design strategies as used for production and service tasks may not be applied similarly for inspections tasks. Requiring to anticipate the attributes of a potential work design variant without having a complete analysis option at hand, explains why engineering and design of work systems remains mostly an expert task. A conceptual model is required to constitute the application of ergonomics knowledge for the design of inspection tasks by delivering insight into the mechanisms contributing or impairing inspection performance. Therefore a work system model is proposed which aims to integrate the most relevant ergonomics concepts in a consistent frame, based on the formal principles of system theory. The linear combination of different approaches shall allow to represent and to explain the complexity of system behavior. This model is extended by a compatible design approach explaining a general structure of design processes and its relationship to the work system model. On the base of the proposed conceptual approach, the particularities of inspections tasks are outlined. This shall support a systematic design of inspection tasks which lack an objective control both on the working level and on the design level.