Human-Machine Cooperation and manufacturing system

Manufacturing companies have to be more and more competitive. They have to improve continuously products quality, as well as reducing cost and shorting production time. The paper focuses on the design of a system that is able to ensure product quality and process protection against damages. The system, so-called “robust filter”, has to stop the process when the command, firstly prepared by process engineer, does not cope anymore with process state. Indeed, some modifications would have been introduced by other agents according to new orders or process' components. But when the process is stopped, all information that could provide clues to explain problem are removed. So, Human-Machine interfaces have been proposed in order to support maintenance agents' activity when they have to understand errors in command. The design of such interfaces has been performed with the principles stemming from the Human-Machine Cooperation approaches and assessed with students.