Human–robot collaboration (HRC) is increasingly prevalent across various industries, promising to boost productivity, efficiency, and safety. As robotics technology advances and takes on more complex tasks traditionally performed by humans, the nature of work and the demands on workers are evolving. This shift emphasizes the need to critically integrate human factors into these interactions, as the effectiveness and safety of these systems are highly dependent on how workers cooperate with and understand robots. A significant challenge in this domain is the lack of a consensus on the most efficient way to operationalize and assess mental workload, which is crucial for optimizing HRC. In this systematic literature review, we analyze the different psychophysiological measures that can reliably capture and differentiate varying degrees of mental workload in different HRC settings. The findings highlight the crucial need for standardized methodologies in workload assessment to enhance HRC models. Ultimately, this work aims to guide both theorists and practitioners in creating more sophisticated, safe, and efficient HRC frameworks by providing a comprehensive overview of the existing literature and pointing out areas for further study.

The paper mainly aims to characterise project management (PM) practices of industrial Lean initiatives by analysing and comparing three main topics: PM approaches, PM teams, and project alignment with the company’s strategy. This research encompasses two exploratory industrial case studies with an extensive literature review. Key professionals were interviewed to obtain an in-depth vision of the field. The study results allowed characterising project management practices of industrial Lean initiatives in industrial companies based on the following dimensions: 1. Understand the needs; 2. Find a suitable team; 3. Use visual tools; 4. Apply a continuous improvement (CI) approach; 5. Identify KPIs for the context; 6. Get support from the top management. This work fills a gap related to studying the PM practices applied during the implementation of Lean initiatives, proposing a schematic representation of PM variables and actors in industrial Lean initiatives. Identifying the main variables and actors that industrial companies use to develop Lean initiatives can be insightful for Lean practitioners in the context of project management.