Preventive Maintenance of Advanced Manufacturing Systems: A Laboratory Experiment and Its Implications for the Human-Centered Approach

Due to rising demands for flexibility of the manufacturing process, there is a strong need to reorganize the task spectrum of the shop-floor staff by integrating, e.g., preventive maintenance functions. In this human-centered approach the shop-floor staff requires support in performing these additional functions. Here, based on an empirical investigation of the knowledge requirements in preventive maintenance of a simulated manufacturing system, a new support method called Behavior-Outcome Feedback is proposed. This method has been developed primarily to promote the execution of preventive maintenance tasks, but may be adopted easily to other functions as well.