A novel quality map for monitoring human well-being and overall defectiveness in product variants manufacturing

Nowadays, companies are faced with demands for increasingly customised products, shifting from mass production to mass customisation. Thus, operators typically have to produce multiple product variants, often characterised by different complexity levels, while meeting quality standards. Companies, however, cannot only be concerned with production quality, but also with the quality and well-being of workers, as demanded by the human-centred paradigm of Industry 5.0. Therefore, this paper proposes a combined analysis of (i) production quality in terms of overall defects generated during product variants manufacturing and (ii) human well-being in terms of stress response. The combination of the two indicators results in a novel tool called “Quality Map”, which enables the evaluation and monitoring of quality systems during the production of product variants from a broad standpoint. To demonstrate the viability of the method, a collaborative human-robot assembly is used as a case study.