Enea has developed new tools based on artificial intelligence to measure and improve safety and efficiency in the workplace.
The first tests were conducted with positive results in two different working contexts, a multinational pharmaceutical company and an Italian metalworking company.
The research was published in the international journal Journal of Industrial Information Integration and is part of the international project "Human-Centred Safety Crowd-Sensitive Indicators", in which Enea (coordination), Sapienza University of Rome, Middlesex University of London and the Human Factors company participated Everywhere and Inail which financed the Italian share.
"The methodology and software tools we have developed are designed to guarantee efficiency and safety in modern companies where production processes involve interaction between people, physical equipment and technological components, including robots, drones, software and sensors. In technical jargon, there we refer to cyber-socio-technical systems", explains Antonio De Nicola, researcher at the Enea Laboratory of Analysis and Protection of Critical Infrastructures and co-author of the study together with his colleague MariaLuisa Villani, Francesco Costantino, Andrea Falegnami and RiccardoPatriarca of Sapienza University of Rome, Mark Sujan of HumanFactors Everywhere and John Watt of Middlesex University.
The team of experts has defined a new resilience indicator to capture the misalignment between formal procedures (Work-As-Imagined) and the work actually carried out by operators in factories and construction sites (Work-As-Done).
"Efficiency and safety are often put at risk by this misalignment, as in reality there are multiple ways of 'seeing' the same work process and it can happen that workers can change, out of necessity, what is established by the protocol. But many of these changes can be potentially dangerous if they are it is, for example, in a power plant or in a construction site", underlines De Nicola.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA