Towards a Structured Decision-Making Framework for Automating Cognitively Demanding Manufacturing Tasks

Due to commercial pressure and changing consumer needs, organizations continuously strive to automate their manufacturing processes. Robotisation options, such as collaborative robots, are attractive to maximize the benefits of higher throughput for highly cognitive tasks. Nevertheless, automation and robotization efforts continue to be limited by highly cognitive processes that are either complex to automate or do not make sense from a business perspective. This challenge is further compounded by an absence of clear guidelines and structured frameworks for guiding automation decisions. This paper aims to bridge this gap by reviewing automation decision-making, including task design and psycho-social influences such as cognitive decisions. This includes consideration of cognitive decisions made by operators, further influenced by the task design, workplace design, and task safety. The proposed approach is demonstrated for real-world use cases, of which feasible automation solutions are proposed following structured decision-making steps.