Appropriate human involvement in assembly and disassembly

Product assembly as well as disassembly is often carried out by workers who have been trained and are flexible with respect to the different variants, delivery dates and changing lot sizes. Though there has been a strong tendency to mechanize and automate production during the last years many operations in assembly and disassembly are still very often performed manually. Furthermore there might be an increase in manually operated assembly or disassembly as a result of product equipment investments with shorter usage time. This keynote paper deals with the state of practice as well as the tendencies in product and production technology and the influence of markets. Another question is going to be the use of information technology on the shop floor level and between the shop floor and other levels within a company as well as the customers. Therefore industrial engineering is increasingly dealing with the influence of organization and structuring of production processes.