A Study on Applying Human-Centered Automation to Network Control Systems in E-Manufacturing

The advantages of applying Internet in E-manufacturing are lower cost, enhancing distances in remote monitoring and control, but it may have time delay problem and it could decrease system performance and stability. In order to keep network control system more stable and effective, a human-centered automation approach was proposed in the network control system. Experiments were designed to identify significant factors of these network control systems, and the task was to command a mobile robot to complete the maze exploration with five kinds of human-centered network control systems. Total elapsed time and subjective evaluation are performance indexes and defined as dependent variables. Furthermore, personal hobby and level of automation for the network control system are independent variables. According to ANOVA results, level of automation indeed has a significant impact on the network control performance. The manual control obtained highest performance in total elapsed time of completing the task. It also showed that it is feasible to apply human centered automation in E-manufacturing.