Enhancing Maintenance Operations in Industry 5.0: A Conceptual User Interface Design for Task Assignment

The Fifth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 5.0, fosters an innovative, resilient, competitive, and society-centered industry. This era emphasizes enhanced human-machine interactions, enabling individuals to manifest their creativity through personalized products and services. As smart factories evolve, the demand for flexibility and adaptability necessitates increased cognitive efforts, particularly in maintenance tasks critical to the flexibility of production systems. Despite the potential of emerging technologies like Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence to aid operators, the complexity of tasks combined with the novelty of such technologies can overwhelm workers, thereby impacting workplace well-being. To tackle these challenges, the DESDEMONA project, funded by the European Union through PRIN as part of NextGenerationEU, is developing a Decision Support System (DSS). This system aims to provide real-time suggestions for assigning the most suitable operators for maintenance tasks characterized by high cognitive demands. The DSS considers three primary factors: the operator’s profile (including skills and age), their emotional state, and the availability of smart devices. This manuscript details the project’s initial results, presenting a simplified mathematical model capable of ranking the optimal list of operators. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the DSS, it is compared, through a simulation approach, with a simulated maintenance supervisor. This comparison highlights the system’s ability to identify, from the k-permutations of N operators, the number of optimal tuples that best fit the operational needs.