Resilience Potentials for Health and Safety Management in Cobot Applications Using the Resilience Analysis Grid

Abstract

The increasing usage of cobot applications reshapes work environments and working conditions, requiring specific advancements in organizational practices for health and safety. Enterprises should shift from a technocentric risk management approach to considering cobots application as socio-technical systems, where resilience engineering is beneficial. This study presents an instantiation of the Resilience Analysis Grid (RAG) in cobot applications with the aim of measuring resilience potentials in terms of the four cornerstones of resilience engineering (respond, learn, monitor, anticipate). The assessment has been provided via a questionnaire to fifteen companies that make use of cobot applications. Results revealed that companies mainly focus on the risk assessment of cobot applications with a traditional view of machine-centric safety, paying less attention to assessing contexts and process variables. This observation seems to arise mainly due to the lack of formally available safety methods or limited guidance from technical standards. Additionally, traditional industrial approaches to risk management lack monitoring of several risks that are essential for managing resilience, defined as the adaptive capacity of people, organizations, and human-machine systems. In addition, companies strongly rely on data from the cobot manufacturer for their safety assessment. The Resilience Analysis Grid was confirmed as a valuable assessment tool for the participating companies to identify improvement areas and assess health and safety from a resilience engineering perspective.

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“…Resilience engineering proposed an operational definition of resilience as a combination of four pillars of abilities a system must possess to manifest a resilient performance, namely, Responding, Learning, Monitoring, and Anticipating [88][89][90]. Systems deficient in these abilities might exhibit brittleness and be compromised (or even destroyed) by pronounced fluctuations internal to them or present in their environment.…”