At the 2026 Hannover Fair, they were everywhere. Humanoid robots walking, reaching, assembling, sharing the floor with human workers for the first time at industrial scale. The promise is seductive: factories are already designed for humans, so a robot shaped like a human should slot right in, no redesign required. Just swap the worker, keep the process.

If only it were that simple.

The reality is messier and far more interesting. Training a humanoid is not like programming a traditional robot. Downtime, failures and engineering support add up fast. And the deeper question – which tasks should go to a humanoid and which should stay with a human? – has no rigorous answer yet. Managers are being asked to make multimillion-euro decisions about a technology whose operational logic nobody has fully mapped.

This thesis sets out to build that map. Starting from the emerging academic and industrial literature on humanoid deployment, the research develops a structured framework that gives operations managers something they currently lack: a methodology for deciding whether to introduce a humanoid at all, which activities to allocate to it first and how to redesign processes and planning systems to actually capture the value the technology promises rather than simply absorbing its costs.

The research combines literature review with real-world case studies, because the factories are not waiting for academia to catch up, and the frameworks that will matter are the ones built close enough to the shop floor to get their hands dirty.

If you want to work on one of the most consequential questions in manufacturing right now, at the exact moment when the answer still needs to be written, this is the thesis that puts you at the frontier.