Evaluation of Workload for Operators in the Aeronautical Sector

The workload affects the physical and mental aspects of the individual and consequently their performance. The concept comes from the interaction between task requirements and human achievement capacity. The objective of this study is to evaluate the mental and operational workload of operators in the aeronautical sector. This experiment involved the collaboration of four engineers (Structure, Stress and Manufacturing Designer; with 9 to 17 years of experience in the area) and four operators (between 18 and 35 years of experience in the area) who work in aircraft production. Developed by Hart and Staveland in 1988,the NASA TLX is a multidimensional rate procedure that provides a global score of the Workload based on a weighted average of evaluations in six subscales: Mental Demand, Physical Demand, Temporal Demand, Performance, Effort and Frustration. This method was used to apply and evaluate four tasks with different levels of difficulty. For the group of engineers, the tasks were part design and nailing. For the group of production operators, the task was drilling and driving. As a result, in the first group, the mental demand was greater, as calculations and analyzes are required. In the second group, the effort demand was the highest, showing that physical and mental demand need to be applied in the same measure.

Keywords: Workload, Nasa tlx, Safety, Aeronautical.

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