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In the era of Industry 4.0 and the introduction of new technologies, collaborative workplaces represent the potential to increase the efficiency of manufacturing systems. The presented research focuses on studying the impact of changing the speed and acceleration of a Cobot to the number of finished products at a collaborative workstation, the average assembly time, and the utilization of the Cobot and worker. In a laboratory experiment, it was demonstrated that changing the parameters of the Cobot significantly affects the optimization parameters of the collaborative workstation productivity. The results indicate an increase in production capacity with an increase in the speed and acceleration of the Cobot, while at the same time highlighting the importance of uniform utilization and occupancy of the Cobot and worker. The findings are particularly interesting from the influence of the Cobot’s audio and video effects on worker, when reducing the average assembly time while increasing the Cobot's capabilities. The results and findings presented open up important new areas of research in the field of social, time and financial justification of collaborative workplaces.

In recent years, there have been more and more collaborative workplaces in different types of manufacturing systems. Although the introduction of collaborative workplaces can be cost-effective, there is still much uncertainty about how such workplaces affect the capacity of the rest of production system. The article presents the importance of introducing collaborative workplaces in manual assembly operations where the production capacities are already limited. With the simulation modelling method, the evaluation of the introduction impact of collaborative workplaces on manual assembly operations that represent bottlenecks in the production process is presented. The research presents two approaches to workplace performance evaluation, both simulation modelling and a real-world collaborative workplace example, as a basis of a detailed time study. The main findings are comparisons of simulation modelling results and a study of a real-world collaborative workplace, with graphically and numerically presented parameters describing the utilization of production capacities, their efficiency and financial justification. The research confirms the expediency of the collaborative workplaces use and emphasise the importance of further research in the field of their technological and sociological impacts.