A Competence-Based Description of Employees in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Part 3: Sustainability and Reconfigurability of Manufacturing SystemsInternational audienceThe increasing demand for customer-specific, cost-effective products with shorter production times is shaping the industrial production environment. Therefore, both human workers and machines must react to these changes with greater flexibility and productivity. This paper shows a procedure to plan the employee ideally into the Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS). The approach systematizes the competences of employees and enables an assessment of different expertise levels to finally realize a flexible integration of them into the constantly changing work environment. Therefore, the competencies of employees must be opposed with the needed skills so that the work processes can be executed adequate according to the product requirements. When this procedure is finally described digitally, companies will be able to realize a flexible workforce planning in the RMS, which is not possible so far