STUDY OF MENTAL WORKLOAD AND HUMAN ERROR IN THE TOOLING DESIGN PROCESS FOR THE SOLDERING OF ELECTRONIC BOARDS.

Abstract

Abstract: Ciudad Juarez Mexico, a company that designs and manufactures tooling for soldering processes of electronic boards daily attends to urgent situations of customer requirements in limited periods. These situations of urgency alter the response capabilities and directly affect the engineers of the design department, since they cause stressful conditions of pressure, fatigue, and frustration, among others, and derive in demands of resources and cognitive capabilities, causing process failures, design errors, and quality rejections. This research aims to determine the main sources of the mental workload of the personnel, as well as to analyze the errors committed in the process. The methodology consists of 3 phases. In the first phase, a Hierarchical Task Analysis was performed to structure the process tasks. In the second phase, a mental workload assessment was performed on 8 designers with NASA TLX. In the third phase, systematic analysis for human error reduction and prediction was used to identify errors. As a result, the hierarchical task analysis of the first task of the process with 5 subtasks is presented. Regarding mental workload, 75% of the sample presented a high mental workload level and the rest presented a medium mental workload. Performance and mental demands were the relevant sources of mental workload. As for human error, 55% were verification, 26% were communication and 19% were verification. It is concluded that the analyses carried out contribute to increasing the knowledge about the demands of the design task and propose changes in the procedures and methods existing in the company for the design and development of the product.