Johan Stahre

Chalmers University of Technology · Department of Industrial and Materials Science

In uncertain manufacturing environments, tools that help companies and supply chains navigate unexpected events and promote sustainability are crucial. However, the application of resilience in manufacturing organizations is limited, often focusing on supply chain resilience. This study used mixed methods to minimize subjectivity in manufacturing r...

Advanced manufacturing research for sustainable battery life cycles is of utmost importance to reach net zero carbon emissions ( European Commission, 2023a ) as well as several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs), for example: 30% reduction of CO 2 emission, 10 million job opportunities and access to electricity for 600 mil...

The emergence of collaborative robots in confined spaces marks a new era in manufacturing and automation. Robots designed to assist human operators in complex and physically demanding tasks are gaining popularity due to their ability to work alongside humans, minimising risks and maximising productivity. However, most applications are in open areas...

The focus of this research is on advancements in HCAI systems for Industry 5.0. Such systems view AI as a critical component for augmenting human work, extending human capabilities within an industrial environment. Thus, they are key enablers for the “Operator 5.0” concept (Romero and Stahre, 2021; Gladysz et al., 2023). The aim of the Research Top...

Industries are facing extensive needs for both digital and green transitions. Adding to the challenges, environmental crises, a recent pandemic, and military conflicts are forming a “perfect storm”. Consequently, companies need to rapidly adapt to new requirements and create resilient, sustainable, and human-centric solutions, a combination often c...

In this paper, the 206 papers published at the Swedish Production Symposium (SPS) conferences in 2018, 2020, and 2022 have been analyzed, primarily focusing their relationship to the six industrial challenges identified by Produktion2030. Based on the analysis, ten in-depth interviews with representatives from the Swedish Production Academy (SPA) a...

This study utilized a systematic-narrative hybrid strategy to overview the concept of skill gap and its measuring approaches. Using the PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic search in January 2023 to retrieve English records from the ProQuest, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science databases using the keywords “skill gap,” “skill mismatch...

Digital platforms offer opportunities to enhance the resilience of manufacturing supply chains facing complexity, data sharing challenges, external stressors (e.g., resource scarcity, geo-political factors), emerging risks and environmental sustainability. Despite the growing importance of digital platforms for industrial value creation, limited re...

Wire harnesses are vital for any modern automotive vehicle. They control the basic functions in a vehicle, for example, windshield wipers and critical functions such as sensors, cameras, and autopilot functions. Thus, the quality of wire harness assembly is highly important. Today, wire harnesses are usually assembled manually, which creates unergo...

A fundamental competitiveness factor in the wire harness manufacturing industry is the economic aspect. A collaborative robot automation project could be very innovative, but the manufacturer will not invest in the project if it does not produce clear financial returns. The cost-benefit analysis of changing from a manual to a collaborative (human-r...

The industrial journey towards digitalization and sustainability requires an understanding of companies' status and desired state. New business models, like digital servitization, can support the transition from pilots to full implementations on the shop floor and the innovation of the end-to-end value chains. This paper aims to identify the requir...

This paper investigates manufacturing companies' current and planned usage of collaborative robots along with possible reasons for the observed slow growth in implementing Collaborative Robot Applications (CRAs) in the industry. The paper also discusses whether similarities can be seen in the Gartner Hype Cycle for technology adoption. Findings fro...

Manufacturing companies face rapid changes impacting the way their employees work and the way work is organized. Future of Work serves as a collective term to describe future working environments that today are characterized by increasing digitalization, requirements on sustainability, and resilience. This literature review synthesis nine topics fo...

This paper discusses the state of the art in battery production research, focusing on high-importance topics to address industrial needs and sustainability goals in this rapidly growing field. We first present current research around three themes: human-centred production, smart production management, and sustainable manufacturing value chains. For...

Wire harness assembly is normally a manual assembly process that poses ergonomic challenges. As a consequence of the rapidly expanding electrification of vehicles and transportation systems, the demand for wire harnesses can be expected to grow radically, further increasing assembly operator challenges. Thus, automating this assembly process is hig...

The machine tool industry plays a major role in the execution of high-quality and efficient complex manufacturing processes. The adoption of digital technologies can transform production systems into more connected, adaptive, efficient, and potentially sustainable systems. A key enabler of this transformation is servitization, a business model that...

Collaboration among actors is necessary to create and develop resilience in value chains. However, collaboration tends to be quite restricted when companies are dealing with disturbances and looking for their root causes. With the objective of increasing collaboration among companies in the same value chain in the process of root cause analysis, th...

Dear friends and colleagues, With great pleasure we are inviting you to submit your latest research to the special session ”Next Generation Human-centered Manufacturing and Logistics Systems for the Operator 5.0” we organize at APMS 2023 conference at NTNU (Trondheim, Norway) - https://www.apms-conference.org/ This special session invites contribut...

Products and assets are becoming increasingly “smart”, e.g., mechatronic, electronic, or cyber-physical. In the lack of fully reliable wireless solutions, extensive wiring and wire bundling into wire harnesses are needed. This has manufacturing implications, leading to increasingly complex wire harness assembly processes, where numerous components,...

The present powerful surge of available online learning platforms will provide employees with enhanced opportunities to rapidly develop their skills, regardless of time and place. Despite the potential, there are challenges for participants on online learning platforms to finalise the courses they engage in. The reasons for the high number of stude...

The wire harness assembly process is a complicated manufacturing activity, which is becoming more complex because of the evolving nature of mechatronic and electronic products that require more connectors, sensors, controllers, communication networking, etc. Furthermore, the demand for wire harnesses continues to grow in all industries worldwide as...

Manufacturing industry has historically had a very high leverage on environmental impact. Therefore, it is urgent to identify how the industry and its employees can contribute to change towards a sustainable society. Industry leaders need to enable their employees to create sustainable solutions, using technologies rising in industry 4.0. However,...

The aim of the Special Session 08 at 27th IEEE ETFA 2022 conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the industry and academia and provide them with a platform to report on recent advances and developments in the newly emerging areas of human-centred Fifth industrial revolution. Based on the aforementioned trends, manufacturi...

The growing relevance of digitalization in production requires the enhancement of human skills and competences in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Higher education has to cope with this need by providing the necessary ICT skills to future industrial engineers, so that they have a good understanding of the complexity of i...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the roles of humans, technology and work in production systems. Although the level of automation on shop floors increases, it is not always feasible or effective to assign the execution of production tasks to autonomous systems. Where total automation is ineffective, new forms of Human-Technology Int...

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown industries all around the world that their current manufacturing systems are not as resilient as expected and therefore many are failing. The workforce is the most agile and flexible manufacturing resource and simultaneously the most fragile one due to its humanity. By making human operators more resil...

A digital transformation is currently taking place in society, where people and things are connected to each other and the Internet. The number of connected devices is projected to be 28 Billion in 2025, and our expectations on digitalization set new requirements of mobile communication technology. To handle the increased amount of connected device...

Production Innovations can substantially alter the behavior of the subsystems of a manufacturing system, for instance: human, technology, information, or management systems. Frequently, such changes occur in combinations of the sub-systems, thus triggering new and improved management strategies, control systems, materials, products, and processes t...

The Swedish strategic innovation programme, Produktion2030, is a national long-term effort towards global industrial competitiveness addressing Swedish industry’s transition towards climate goals of the European Green Deal while simultaneously realising smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 (I4.0). This paper investigated the extent of sustainabilit...

The manufacturing industry is connecting people and equipment with new digital technologies, enabling a more continuous stream of data to represent processes. With more things connected, the interest in a connectivity solution that can support communication with high reliability and availability will increase. The fifth generation of telecommunicat...

Bicycle production has not changed much over the last 100 years, it is still performed mainly by manual labor in mass production. During the global pandemic, the demand for ecologically friendly and customized transport has increased. Hence, customers start to impose the same requirements on bikes as on cars: they want more customized products and...

The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to deeply change several aspects of the manufacturing industry. Among them, the logistics and supply chain activities will be affected by these changes both at operational and managerial level to face the market drivers of flexibility and mass-customisation. In this context, the work of ope...

Purpose Scholars and practitioners within industrial maintenance management are focused on understanding antecedents, correlates and consequences of the concept of “Smart Maintenance,” which consists of the four dimensions, namely, data-driven decision-making, human capital resource, internal integration and external integration. In order to facili...

Using digital technologies can support the flow and use of digital information in a timelier manner both within and between production systems. Smart manufacturing systems use these enabling technologies to maximize the capabilities’ cost, delivery, flexibility, and quality. The focus in industry so far has mainly been on the technologies and syste...

The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to deeply change several aspects of the manufacturing industry. Among them, the logistics and supply chain activities will be affected by these changes both at operational and managerial level to face the market drivers of flexibility and mass-customisation. In this context, the work of ope...

Humans are all makers of a sort. The tools we operate constantly leverage our human capabilities and evolve over history to take advantage of any innovation or a new source of power that emerges. Human-Technology Symbiosis has always been the basis for leaps in human prosperity. As we are presently in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4...

How do modernized maintenance operations, often referred to as “Smart Maintenance”, impact the performance of manufacturing plants? This question is a pressing challenge for practitioners and scholars in industrial maintenance management, in direct response to the transition to an industrial environment with pervasive digital technologies. This pap...

How do modernized maintenance operations, often referred to as “Smart Maintenance”, impact the performance of manufacturing plants? The inability to answer this question backed by data is a problem for industrial maintenance management, especially in light of the ongoing rapid transition towards an industrial environment with pervasive digital tech...

Managing Human Capital Investments in the Fourth Industrial Revolution - “Skills as Primary Assets”.

Social Sustainability of Future Manufacturing - Challenges & Strategies.

Industry 4.0 technologies, such as enterprise wearables, can foster better industrial hygiene to keep operators healthy, safe, and motivated within emerging cyber-physical production systems. This paper provides an optimistic perspective on opportunities evolving from wearable devices in an Industry 4.0 workplace environment to support occupational...

Industry 4.0 technologies, such as enterprise wearables, can foster better industrial hygiene to keep operators healthy, safe, and motivated within emerging cyber-physical production systems. This paper provides an optimistic perspective on opportunities evolving from wearable devices in an Industry 4.0 workplace environment to support occupational...

Improvements in data storage and processing technologies have led many managers to change how they make decisions, relying less on intuition and more on data. This trend is especially notable for the manufacturing industry where Big Data applications, i.e. data analytics, are mentioned as an important enabler of value creation with the event of the...

This paper presents a generic technical solution that can increase Industry 4.0 maturity by collecting data from sensors and control systems on the shop floor. Within the research project “5G-Enabled Manufacturing”, an LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network with 5G technologies was deployed on the shop floor to enable fast and scalable connectivity. Thi...

This paper presents technical solutions to increase Industry 4.0 maturity. Within the “5G-Enabled Manufacturing” project, a 5G network has been deployed at the shop floor to enable fast and scalable connectivity. This network was used to connect a grinding machine to a private cloud to enable visibility and transparency of the production data, whic...

Manufacturing industries are experiencing a technical paradigm shift that will change how they run their operations. Equipment and personnel generate an ever-increasing amount of data, and connectivity enables to utilize data to a larger extent. Connecting a machine is not a technical obstacle anymore, but with all available data, the challenge is...

The paper suggests an assessment tool for production innovation, a way of assessing innovation aspects in production development projects. The tool captures innovation as “new and value-added change of a production related activity”. The tool was tested through a questionnaire survey sent to 30 research and innovation (R&I) projects funded by the S...

This paper describes a novel approach to build a modular and adaptable information platform for Chalmers Smart Industry Hub. The platform utilizes the IoT paradigm i.e. decentralized and event-driven architecture, to interconnect production modules such as an assembly system, ERP, analytics, etc. Real life industrial problems are realized as indust...

Digitalization is an ongoing revolution within manufacturing industry. 5G technology is expected to play an important role in ensuring connectivity. Digitalized factories set high requirements on technical availability, and therefore also on maintenance performance. However, it is difficult to get top-level decision makers to invest in maintenance,...

The prevailing industrial digitalisation flagship initiative, Industrie 4.0, gathers a substantial part of its functionality from the human in the system. This will drive a need for focus on both human and social dimensions of technology. The paper explores the roles of the Social Operator 4.0 in smart and social factory environments, where humans,...

Manufacturing firms are constantly evolving to accommodate new customer requirements as well as emerging technologies, materials, processes and equipment. As a consequence, a broad range of production innovation opportunities arise for manufacturing firms to produce their products in smarter, more flexible, agile and sustainable ways. This paper pr...

While market requirements demand that manufacturing systems increase their responsiveness, assembly fixtures remain limited in corresponding to the same demand. Fixture designers as practitioners are left without guidance to design reconfigurable fixtures. This study proposes a comparative design procedure for reconfigurable assembly fixtures that...

Despite extensive research on future manufacturing and the forthcoming fourth industrial revolution (implying extensive digitalisation), there is a lack of understanding regarding the specific changes that can be expected for maintenance organisations. Therefore, developing scenarios for future maintenance is needed to define long-term strategies f...

Purpose – A common understanding of what events to regard as production disturbances (PD) are essential for effective handling of PDs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to answer the two questions: how are individuals with production or maintenance management positions in industry classifying different PD factors? Which factors are being meas...

[BEST PAPER AWARD] This paper presents early concepts and future projections of the so-called ‘Operator 4.0’, understood as a smart, skilled operator who performs not only cooperative work with robots but also aided work by machines as and if needed by means of human cyber-physical systems, advanced human-machine interaction technologies and adapti...

A vision for the Operator 4.0 is presented in this paper in the context of human cyber-physical systems and adaptive automation towards human-automation symbiosis work systems for a socially sustainable manufacturing workforce. Discussions include base concepts and enabling technologies for the development of human-automation symbiosis work systems...

This paper provides an overview of the EU project SO SMART (Socially Sustainable Manufacturing for the Factories of the Future), a coordinated support action (CSA) project. SO SMART examined the conditions in Europe for creating socially sustainable workplaces in the manufacturing sector, where factories flourish along with their social environment...

This paper provides an overview of the EU project SO SMART (Socially Sustainable Manufacturing for the Factories of the Future), a coordinated support action (CSA) project. SO SMART examined the conditions in Europe for creating socially sustainable workplaces in the manufacturing sector, where factories flourish along with their social environment...

National competitiveness in the manufacturing sector requires continuous investments in innovation, research, and education. Swedish manufacturing industry have joined forces with universities and research institutes to initiate Produktion2030, a successful public-private-partnership research and innovation programme. In this programme, industry is...

Human-centricity in manufacturing is becoming an essential enabler to achieve social sustainable manufacturing. In particular, human-centric automation can offer new means to increase competitiveness in the face of new social challenges for the factories of the future. This paper proposes a Human-Centred Reference Architecture that can structure an...

The need for flexibility combined with higher complexity create challenges on todays manufacturing systems and the human operators doing the tasks. The use of information and communication technology (ICT) as cognitive automation and to increase information sharing among the operators has been discussed as important tools to meet those challenges....

Better resource utilisation for production systems can be achieved in many different ways. When it comes to human workers, they can either be allocated as more flexible machines, loaded with materials and a set of instructions, or they can be trusted to plan their own work. Moving towards the more automated and highly connected future production sy...

This paper reports perspectives on values and contributions manufacturing innovation bring to meet increased competition in the current changing manufacturing climate. This is obtained through a multiple case study of three manufacturing innovations, mapping values from each case, and analysing how the innovations have contributed to each of the st...

Currently few attempts to properly structure knowledge that specifically supports a fully sustainable e-waste treatment system design have been proposed in literature. As a result, this paper sets up the prerequisites for a high-level framework to design sustainable plants in the supply chain of e-waste. The framework addresses production and envir...

Human-centricity in manufacturing is becoming an essential enabler to achieve social sustainable manufacturing. In particular, human-centric automation can offer new means to increase competitiveness in the face of new social challenges for the factories of the future. This paper proposes a Human-Centred Reference Architecture that can structure an...

Managing complexity in final assembly includes understanding and supporting the operators cognitive processes. In this paper three models for information handling and decision-making are combined. The relevance and use of the combined behavioural characteristics are discussed in industrial and experimental cases. The cases show how cognitive proces...