Dong Zhoua, Jiayu Chenb, Chuan Lvc, , , Qingyuan Caob

    a State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, BeiHang University, Beijing, China

    b School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, BeiHang University, Beijing, China

    c Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Beijing, China

    Received 17 April 2015, Accepted 12 June 2016, Available online 18 June 2016

Abstract

Designers must consider human factors/ergonomics when making decisions from the perspective of maintainability. As an important aspect of maintainability, maintenance space should be made adequate at the design stage to achieve a convenient maintenance process. A maintenance space evaluation method that considers ergonomics is proposed in this study. By comparing free swept volumes and constrained swept volumes in a virtual environment, maintenance space could be evaluated quantitatively and objectively. The results of the evaluation are obtained by combining the principles of ergonomics and maintainability. These results can help designers improve product design such that it fits ergonomics and maintainability requirements. A case study is introduced at the end of this paper to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method in efficiently evaluating the maintenance space based on the layout design of the product components in the design stage

Relevant to industry

For a large number of disasters caused by human errors in current industry, the result of this study contributes a guide to fully consider human factors in maintainability design through virtual environment and is beneficial to designers and engineers of industrial application fields