Horizon CDT Research Highlights

Research Highlights

The Use of Personalisation in Automated Digital Manufacturing Environments

  Joshua Duvnjak (2020 cohort)

My research revolves around the theme: the use of personalisation within automated digital manufacturing environments. My PhD project will examine this from different perspectives: systems design, acceptance and performance. In addition, these forms the aims of the project. It is important to understand how personalisation can be used, as the implementing any technology into a new environment can have unforeseen challenges and problems that need to be addressed.

As a preliminary phase the studying of the current literature personalisation was completed. This was to understand the current state of the literature. By doing this the PhD would retain coherence with existing work and increase its validity. This was combined with a pilot study (with other researchers) into a Contravision method of understanding Digital Manufacturing Technologies formed the rationale behind the project and what areas the PhD should focus on.

In order to understand how personalisation systems should be designed, an experiment was conducted with an approach towards how users would want these systems designed. This was achieved through codesign workshops. The concept of utilising users also allows users to describe which systems they dislike, and like which contributes towards the aim of understanding acceptance.

The focus on acceptance was further explored through surveys examining different potential systems. These systems were given to users with manufacturing experience in order to closely match our findings with potential stakeholders in future systems.

The final aim is to understand how personalisation can affect performance of tasks. This will be done through the use of a representative manufacturing task. As with the previous experiment, this will be done by gather participants who have experience of manufacturing environments.