What is it about?

Container cranes are traditionally operated manually by operators who work on-site from inside the crane's cabin. To answer the demand for higher safety and productivity, there are newer cranes that can work semi-autonomously and be operated remotely from the control room. This study investigates how the shift from on-site to remote operation, as well as from manual to semi-autonomous control, affects the work experience by interviewing operators who worked with both types of container cranes.

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Why is it important?

The results from this study suggest that the shift from on-site to remote operation provided positive experiences for crane operators, such as having a safer workplace and the ability to work flexibly. However, this shift also created negative experiences due to the difficulties in case of camera problems and communicating with on-site workers. The shift from manual to semi-autonomous control also produced positive experiences for crane operators, such as having less workload and reduced liability in case of accidents that happen when cranes are working automatically. However, this shift also affected operators' experience negatively because their work became increasingly boring.

Perspectives

This study provides an example of the capability of new technologies in improving the current condition and creating new issues simultaneously. Understanding the consequence of new technologies on work experience is important in safety-critical domains, such as crane operations, since one accident could cause serious damage to life and property.

Taufik Akbar Sitompul
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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This page is a summary of: The Impacts of Different Work Locations and Levels of Automation on Crane Operators’ Experiences: A Study in a Container Terminal in Indonesia, November 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3572921.3572941.
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