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Managing the complexity of modern systems is a current challenge involving all the phases of a system development process. Complex systems also mean a great number of stakeholders involved and just as many needs to satisfy. In the Systems Engineering approach for complex systems design, Requirements Engineering provides methods to collect stakeholders needs and to translate them into system requirements. Furthermore, several tools currently allow creating requirements repository and manage their properties and changes. Traceability is also implemented to verify design against requirements. Although there are several standards and guidelines which provide criteria and rules for writing requirement statements, it is still missed a process that drives the user in the correct requirement construction. The present paper faces the requirement specification process in order to provide tools that can support and drive designers in the requirements writing. In particular, the paper (i) provides a framework for writing syntactically correct requirements that can be early verified against pre-defined criteria such as clarity, singularity, conformity, and descriptiveness; (ii) presents a software tool for creating well-defined requirements statements offering the user the possibility to formulate “correct requirements by construction”. The driven definition of system requirements leads to a well-defined specification, thus allowing time and efforts reduction during the following steps of system development process.

In the paradigm of Industry 4.0, innovative workplaces characterized by Human-Robot Collaboration represent an important topic to improve productivity and adaptability of manufacturing plants. In this context, the design of a collaborative workplace is a challenging issue because of the high level of complexity due to multidisciplinary and non-homogeneity of its features, as well as the presence of human very close to the robot. This work faces with the complexity of collaborative workplace and proposes a structured framework to support strategic decisions in designing. It suggests a clusterization of factors and effects, based on five domains involved in collaborative workplace, in order to better consider the human safety and working conditions. Consequently, the main elements of a collaborative workplace are highlighted in a matrix decomposed in relevant features and main incident factors, and a multi-level designing workflow is described to report collaborative performances. The proposed approach manages connections among the elements by means of the graph theory in the form of an adjacency matrix in order to show and manage the complexity of the problem. A user interface named Smart Graph Interface was developed to read and manipulate the contents of the adjacency matrix. Main results are reported on an assembly and sealing of a refrigerator, to spread out principal outcomes in terms of applicability and robustness.

The innovation driven Industry 5.0, in agreement with Industry 4.0, leads to consider human in a prominence position as the center of manufacturing field. This pushes towards the hybridization of manufacturing plants promoting a fully collaboration between human and robot. Furthermore, the new paradigm of "human centred design" and "anthropocentric design" allows enabling a synergistic combination of human and robot skills. However, properly collaborative workplaces are currently very few. Industry is still not confident, and systems integrators hesitate to venture into Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). Despite the effort in collaborative robotics, a general solution to overcome the current limitations in designing of collaborative workplaces still misses. In the current work, a Knowledge-Based Approach (KBA) is adopted to face collaborative workplace designing problem. The framework resulting from the KBA allows developing a modelling paradigm that enable to define a streamlined approach for the layout designing of a collaborative workplace. Finally, a what-if analysis and a ANOVA analysis are performed to generate and evaluate a set of scenarios related to a collaborative workplace for quality inspection of welded parts. Facing the high complexity and multidisciplinary of HRC can be conveyed to develop a general design approach aimed at overcoming the difficulties that limit the spread of HRC in the manufacturing field.

Collaborative robotic solutions, where humans and robots share a common workspace performing tasks concurrently without physical safety barriers dividing them, are entering the 4.0 manufacturing market. Some proven and tested use cases of Human-Robot Collaboration have been implemented, but their identification process is often just based on the intuition of planning engineers. The purpose of this work is to propose a systematic approach for the identification of potential collaborative workstations within an industrial production plant. In order to do this a multi-layer modelling approach was used and enriched. The multi-layer approach defines the overall goal of the industrial process, the sub-processes that made it possible, the activity models that enables a flow of activities and, finally, a set of methods to carry out the activities. A morphological box of methods that can be used to achieve the specific goal of identifying suitable collaborative workplaces in an industrial plant, through a process of HRC potential analysis is, therefore, ready to be deeply investigated and used.