Advantages of assembly lines in Sheltered Work Centres for Disabled. A case study

Including workers with disabilities in flow shop scheduling

“…Miralles et al (2007)), we study in this work the integration of WWDs into flow shops scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the makespan.…”

“…For assembly lines, Miralles et al (2007) have proposed the Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem (ALWABP). In this problem the task execution time depends on the worker, and tasks as well as workers must be assigned to a fixed number of stations such that the production rate of the assembly line is maximized.…”

“…The additional component of finding the optimal allocation of the WWDs to machines increases the number of possible solutions of the permutation flow shop by a factor m. Computation time in flow shops are important in practice due to rescheduling caused by workers rotation, turnover and absenteeism, mainly with WWDs, where periodical health and psychological support are more usual (MIRALLES et al, 2007). Therefore, advanced techniques are necessary to obtain the optimal allocation of the WWDs in addition to the optimal schedule in a reasonable computation time.…”

A population-based algorithm for the bi-objective assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem

“…The assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem (ALWABP) recently introduced by Miralles et al (2007) is a variant of the simple assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) in which task times are worker dependent. This problem typically occurs in assembly lines with disabled workers in which a worker found efficient to accomplish a particular set of assembly tasks may be inefficient on (or even unable to carry out) another set of assembly tasks.…”

Simple heuristics for the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem

“…The ALWABP has been introduced in the literature by Miralles et al (2007) by means of a case study in an assembly line of a Spanish sheltered work center for the disabled where a fixed number of workers should be present in an assembly line whose production rate should be maximized (ALWABP-2). The same authors have later developed a branch-and-bound algorithm for the problem, enabling the solution of small-sized instances (Miralles et al 2008).…”