Learning factories as laboratories for socio-technical experiments

Abstract

Production systems might be viewed as complex socio-technical systems. A central part of socio-technical systems theory, is that improvements demands joint optimization of both the technological and the social parts of the system. Current research on socio-technical systems are, however, mostly interpretivistic with focus on qualitative and descriptive studies of existing manufacturing systems. Learning factories are full scale manufacturing simulators where it could be possible to perform experimental studies on socio-technical systems. This paper discusses the methodological aspects of such experiments and relates the discussion to 15 years experiences from a hospital simulator.